Is Competition the
Law of Nature with Mary Catherine Bateson
Charles Darwin stood the biology of his time on its head
with his theory of evolution by natural selection, and his ideas about
competition still lend authority to economics. Herbert Spencer, a popular
precursor of sociology who was Darwin's contemporary, has been regarded as the
founder of "social Darwinism" but actually Darwin borrowed from him the
concept of the "survival of the fittest," coined by Spencer on the
basis of his observations of the ferocious early years of industrialization.
Biologists today are recognizing more and more examples of cooperation as
key to evolution -- when will the economists (and the politicians) catch on? Mary
Catherine Bateson is one of Hancock's resident authors after a career teaching
anthropology and linguistics at George Mason, Amherst, Northeastern and Harvard
as well as abroad in Iran and the Philippines. Free and open to all.
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