Many narratives we use to explain our world are overly simplistic and therefore fundamentally flawed. Competition is one of them. We love the story that populations compete “to the death,” as in warfare, with the stronger one wiping out the weaker. Yet, as we’ve seen with populations as diverse as pipe-dwelling bacteria and the Iroquoian people of North America, this simply isn’t true. Populations are rarely eradicated; instead they assimilate with larger populations or find a niche in which they can retain many of their traits and continue their way of life in an equilibrium of coexistence.
The white settlers who entered Iroquoia came up with their own narratives to justify their intrusions, separate themselves from the Indians, and eventually force them from their own homeland. The tribes suffered but were not eradicated by the Europeans. Eventually the American Indians acted on their sovereign nationhood and began to participate in the economy and craft a new cultural relationship with modern society by establishing education programs, museums, and income-generating casinos on their land in order to improve their lives.
Human wars—even though we try to justify them with ideology—are comparable to natural population phenomena. The European settlers of the New World frontier and the American Indians were acting in a way that would be familiar to any evolutionary biologist or natural historian. They came into conflict as natural resources became increasingly limited, their home ranges expanded, and—after much bloodshed and fighting—eventually found a functional equilibrium that allowed the populations to coexist (this might be considered “dysfunctional,” from the Indian perspective). Granted, all these populations were significantly changed by the conflict, but none of them was completely eradicated by it.
The story of early American history is not one of conquerors and vanquished people, it is one of evolutionary transformation. That is to say, from both a biological and a cultural perspective, assimilation of our species is evident. This assessment says nothing about the mistreatment of American Indians, or of their displacement, all of which should be viewed with compassion and sympathy. What we should take from it, however, is that the biased view—of a more “advanced” culture outcompeting or “rubbing out” a lesser one, is not tenable.
The understanding of assimilation requires a worldview that favors ongoing symbiosis over a definitive battle for existence. But that in itself is not enough. Another component is necessary: the environmental influence on the commingling populations. Such a perspective leads us to reconsider radically how we can coexist with other human populations and other species. To do so we will have to accept that many of the ideologies that we live by are flawed, and then replace them with more functional ones that allow us to engage with the populations that surround us while we try to alter the environment of our coexistence. Reassessing two dominant narratives—competition and free will—provides a starting point for such a revision. Both of these concepts have been misapplied to justify behavior in our modern life, while neither one by itself is sufficient to cause a new synthesis. I’ll discuss the first of these ideas, that “life is a competition,” in this chapter, and turn to the popular idea of “free will” in the next.
The idea of competitive struggle in populations began as a narrative device by Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798 to describe poverty and wealth in an increasingly industrialized society. His An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, published in 1798, treated food as a prize of sorts. His postulate was simple: As human numbers increase at an exponential rate, food production cannot keep pace, and therefore a struggle for existence results among all individuals.147 Food, according to Malthus, is the primary limited resource, and famine is a natural impediment to (or “check” on) population growth. The human population, if left unchecked, would grow according to the exponential law of increase (x2) while food can only increase at the much slower arithmetical law of increase (2x).
Famine was, to Malthus, an obvious limiting factor in the happiness and health of the human population. But it was also a constant threat to population growth. The more work expended in fighting off starvation, the less time and energy is spent on reproduction. The theoretical framework of Malthus’s essay is straightforward enough, and makes perfect sense. It was, however, only the starting point for a much broader political polemic against the idea of charity for the poor.
The English Poor Laws were created during the reign of Elizabeth I (1533–1603) to help the poor survive by giving members of a parish money for food if they could not provide for themselves and their families. This money was raised by taxation on the middle- and upper-class citizens. By the time Malthus wrote his essay, this system had been in place for nearly two hundred years. He saw it as a perpetual drag on the upper classes of English society. It was the socioeconomic puzzle of dealing with the poor, rather than a serious intellectual consideration of competition, that motivated Malthus to write his essay. He believed that providing charity for the poor removes a natural check on the population (famine), therefore leaving them free to increase population size, putting those of the middle and upper classes (not to mention other poor people as well) in jeopardy of famine.
The solution, according to Malthus, was to abandon the Poor Laws because they did not erase poverty, and they put a strain on the upper classes to boot. He believed that policies to feed the poor essentially ignored the real problem of population increase (populations have intrinsic properties of increasing exponentially). The only change that could stem that increase was something “in the physical constitution of our nature”148—hence not policies, or political agendas, but rather personal actions and responsibility, principally “moral restraint,” or birth control.149 It was therefore imprudent, as Malthus saw it, to institute any policy that interfered with the natural competitiveness of workers. If they were assured of sustenance (from charity) what would motivate them to work? Hence competition between workers was a “necessary stimulus.”150 Without it there would be no industrial production in the lower classes, or checks on the growth of their population.
But something else depended heavily on competition being real: Malthus’s reasoning. The very foundation of the Malthusian worldview would disappear if competition ceased to exist. For this reason, competition was not questioned deeply by Malthus, or by his most famous follower, Charles Darwin, as we shall see.
Malthus’s essay was criticized for three decades after its publication, yet competition remained out of the spotlight. Instead critics focused on things like future improvement. They couldn’t understand how an increase in population could be viewed as a threat to humankind. Intellectuals of the early nineteenth century believed that population growth must be a sign of prosperity, not limitation or danger. They were blind, perhaps, to the broad causes of poverty, and of course, the ones doing the writing in those days were of the privileged classes, trying to avoid responsibility for taking care of unemployed workers.
Despite its early criticism, the gist of Malthus’s essay has come to be an often-repeated explanation for why some people have so little, while others have so much. Competition has hardened into a seldom-questioned truism. Ignoring historical factors, or the constraints imparted by socioeconomics, most people today believe that the workforce is seen as a competition in which the winners get rewarded and the losers deserve their low status. In this over simplistic view of things, poor people have no reason to claim unfairness because the competitive struggle—the “game,” if you will—is not rigged. Each member of society is in the same competitive arena. The feast-or-famine rules are the same for rich and poor alike: If you lose too many games, by not performing well in your job, you will sink progressively lower on the ladder of success. Those at the bottom are simply not trying hard enough, and they should be able to wrest themselves out of poverty if they would simply try harder, perhaps work more hours, or try some other job that’s better suited to their abilities.
This grim view of society is not one to which I subscribe. I see diversity and variation in wealth and class as part of the process of mixing in our modern culture. I’m reminded of this every time I walk the streets of New York City, or any other major city for that matter. I am amazed at the diversity of our species. Contrary to the popular view of a monotypic, gritty, uptight, angry populace, New Yorkers are a kaleidoscopic conglomerate of cultures and physical appearances. Every face that passes seems familiar in some ways but mysteriously foreign in others. I try to guess the backgrounds or ethnicity of many whom I see, but I know I’m usually wrong. I’m biased, like everyone else, by my education and stereotypic thinking, no matter how open-minded I try to be. I have to remind myself constantly that supposedly “conquered” races and forgotten foreign customs are nearly as common here as are Midwestern tourists or New Jersey housewives. Who we consider as foreign is usually just a matter of what version of history is most familiar to us. The more I travel and the more I think about it, the entire concept of “foreigner” is becoming passé. Our species is amalgamating before my very eyes.
New York—like most big cities—is built on the idea that the most worthy of us win the biggest rewards. The hierarchy of success is all around us—I take the bus or subway, you take a cab, she takes a limo—you can’t miss it even if you want to. No matter what you’ve achieved, or how much you have, it’s easy to feel like a failure in the Big Apple. There’s always someone doing better than you—or at least appearing to. Of course success is often subjective and sometimes short-lived. There’s always some fitter, “worthier” person coming up from behind. Someone who, through diligent study and hard work alone, is now somehow better—faster, smarter, more creative, or more aggressive—than his or her predecessors. Our culture is built on the idea that life is a competition, and that the winners are more deserving of its rewards than are the losers. This idea crept into our daily lives from nearly constant exposure to sports, celebrity culture, big business, warfare, nation building, and relationships, among other aspects of modern society. It is now so ingrained in our collective consciousness that it is generally believed to be unassailable.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve deluded myself into believing the “outdated” view of America as the land of equal opportunity for all, but I think this is nonsense. It seems that there are no immediate differences between me and those others scurrying about. New York City at rush hour is a good example of a level playing field. The vast majority of us are trying to grab the same taxi, or pushing through the turnstiles in a hurry to catch the next subway train. Some of us can hail cabs better—I can often “outcompete” less-able-bodied people on the same corner because I will walk into the street to make my presence known—but I’ve never been so desperate for success that I would take a cab away from an older person, or a mother with kids, for instance. The people taking limos may appear better off at first blush, but the fact is that they have simply opted for comfort rather than speed, because walking is often faster on the crosstown streets. If getting from point A to point B is the only measure of success, I might feel a momentary triumph when a cab finally stops to pick me up instead of stopping at the next corner to pick up someone else. On any numbered street in midtown, a fifteen-minute walk may just turn into a half-hour sit-and-wait in the backseat. The other commuters and I may have important historical or socioeconomic differences, but in this very moment it seems that luck, rather than skill, plays the biggest role in who succeeds and who doesn’t.
We’ve been led to believe that competition is a dominating fact of success in life. The accepted dogma is that in our society you have to work hard to be the best or someone else will take a job or a resource away from you. Competing businesses will result in better goods and services for all.151 The free market is king. Parents tell their kids to “do your best” as they head out the door to school. But most parents really mean to say, “Do better than the others” because they’ve bought into the seductive belief that privilege is earned by winning, and winning is the only form of success.
But is success in human life measureable by the same criteria we use to gauge success in biological competition among wild species? What about games and sports? Should we consider a person’s lifetime of activities some sort of win-loss statistic? Popular notions such as “Life is a game,” “Nice guys finish last,” or “Coffee is for closers,” all imply that rewards in life are easily measured and that success comes only from winning. We can thank Charles Darwin and the intellectual revolution he ushered into the minds of Western civilization for the notion that rewards in life can be boiled down to one thing: advantageous possession of traits that allow one individual to outcompete another in the struggle for life.
Darwin read Malthus’s essay around 1838, after spending many years thinking about an explanation for the diverse adaptations and distributions of plants and animals that he observed on his five-year voyage around the world (on board HMS Beagle, 1831–36). Seeing the spoils of competition as “favourable variations,” Darwin used Malthusian reasoning to suggest that under the conditions of a population’s struggle for existence, favorable variations (those that led to success in survival and reproduction) would tend to be preserved, while unfavorable ones (those that failed to enhance survival or reproduction) would quickly die out. The continuation of this process, through multiple generations, according to Darwin, would lead to new species, natural selection “picking the most profitable.”152 Hence all new varieties of species are spurred on by incessant competition. Because of the inherent properties of population increase, and the scarcity of resources caused by Malthusian principles, even a slight variation in a trait that enhances survival and reproduction can be considered a “win” for the competitors.153
Darwin’s fame came roughly twenty years later, after the publication of On the Origin of Species. The popularity of his controversial book—which stated that natural law (competition and natural selection), rather than divine purpose, was responsible for the creation of new species, including humans—can hardly be overstated. The initial printing of twelve hundred books sold out two days after their release date (November 24, 1859). The second printing of three thousand books sold out the very next month. Without ceasing, the publisher released more copies for sale, and they kept selling out for decades to come. Darwin’s science was not easily understood by most people, but his fame was established early on by the incessant lampooning of him as the originator of the idea that humans were descended from apes. His face appeared repeatedly in the mainstream weekly press, Punch magazine, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Weekly, and Fun, and their equivalent publications in other countries. Darwin’s ideas were discussed in universities and households all over Europe, Russia, and America, most people discounting or disbelieving his conclusions. Nonetheless, at his death, in 1882, Charles Darwin was buried at Westminster Abbey in London, alongside some of the most important people in English history—kings and queens, scientists and poets, statesmen and scholars—as a lasting testament to his indelible fame.
It was Darwin’s idea, rather than his personality or actions, that drove his renown. While it is well known that the idea of natural selection originated with insights from Malthus, less well known is the fact that Darwin helped to make Malthus famous in return. As Darwin’s natural selection became the primary mechanism for explaining evolution throughout the twentieth century, Malthus’s ideas about competition came along with it. Together these ideas hardened into the core of greatest influence on most biologists’ thinking. This happened long after both men were dead.
Today we have political and economic theory being informed by what happens in nature—natural selection operating among competing businesses for instance—and biology being informed by economics (ecology is often referred to in terms of “budgets” and the “balance” of nature). This tradition isn’t new; it can be traced back to Darwin’s time, when political economists began to adopt Darwinian ideas into their teaching.154 The point here is that the tradition of using ideas from nature and applying them to economics, and vice versa, is an old one. Sometimes entrenched intellectual traditions like this operate without anyone challenging the logic necessary for their operation. Competition is such an important explanatory concept that a crack in its foundation might bring down the entire edifice of modern economics, political science, and modern biology all at once. The most popular narratives from all these fields have transcended the ivory tower and have taken root among millions of readers of award-winning books such as Freakonomics, The Selfish Gene, or Civilization: The West and the Rest. All these depend heavily on the idea that competition drives everything forward in an unending natural progression. Without competition, there is no progress. Without competition, there is no continuity of the intellectual tradition that links nature to socioeconomics. So it goes unchallenged.
Without questioning competition, however, we are susceptible to scandal. Suppose the traditional unchallenged concept of competition—as the stimulus and primary mechanism of natural selection—is wrong and is used instead simply as an easy excuse to perpetuate a deeply unfair social system by giving it a quasi-Darwinian spin: The only way to escape poverty, for instance, is through outcompeting your neighbor in some low-wage occupation (as opposed to associating yourself with institutions that provide living wages, and helping each other maintain that institution). Darwin wrote “Each new species is produced … by having some advantage over those with which it comes into competition; and the consequent extinction of the less favored forms almost invariably follows.”155 This idea, that the less-favored forms almost “invariably” go extinct has been shown to be incorrect. In the latter half of the twentieth century, much was written about extinction, and the discovery of the “Big Five” mass extinction events turned out to reveal something profound. Extinction was not caused by poorly adapted traits—in fact most forms seemed well adapted to their habitats. The problem was that populations could not change rapidly enough to contend with the extreme swings in environmental conditions.156 This made scientists—as it should make us too—question the efficacy of competition and natural selection in sustaining the evolutionary process.
I try to minimize the importance of competition even when I’m actively engaged in it. In a sense this strategy minimizes the significance of winning, but it also makes losing feel more hopeful, like part of the process of life—not an ending but part of a larger continuum. Like most people raised in this society, I love to compete. My brother and I used to play games incessantly with friends in the neighborhood throughout our childhood. When we weren’t arranging teams for touch football or baseball at the local schoolyard, we were designing shooting ranges in the basement for our BB guns, or playing endless rounds of Ping-Pong during cold winter days when it was too cold to throw the ball around outdoors. The fun I had in those childhood years, and throughout my teens, made me learn to love skilled activities. Nowadays I’m very competitive at sports, academics, and music. I’ve always believed, for instance, that my band is the best punk band in the world, and am constantly seeking to prove it. I take it personally if a particular show we’ve played gets a bad review. I’m also a hockey player in a local adult league. I’m one of the oldest players now; the other guys are younger and faster, but that doesn’t diminish the pleasure I take in playing. They may play a better game than I do, but I still enjoy the chance to compete against them.
These activities help me recognize that there is more to competition than winning. I’m a huge advocate of sports, but I always knew that I could never play at the professional level in any of them. It doesn’t matter to me. Participating in them at any level adds interest and health to my life. The pleasure is to play, even if sometimes you don’t win. There’s a thrill to be gained by just participating in the process. While it’s true that each game is an opportunity to improve on what you’ve learned in the previous effort, it’s really the feeling that you’ve given it your best, and had some unexpected surprises along the way, that makes sports so rewarding. And that’s an idea that I think has been lost in our culture; the win-loss statistic is not an ultimate gauge by which to measure one’s life.
Don’t get me wrong. I still believe that only one team, or one individual, should walk home with a winner’s trophy. I’ve heard that there are leagues for kids in some places that award trophies for everyone, regardless of skill, with the tacit suggestion that every kid is a winner. This is a misguided attempt to encourage them to stick with the sport, perhaps, or simply to lie to them because some parents are afraid that their kids will become depressed if they’re ever allowed to believe that they lack talent. This tactic puts an undue emphasis on the prize and actually detracts from the important functions of sports, such as skill development and social engagement.
Competition, as a concept that pits two individuals (or teams, or groups) against each other in the quest for a clearly defined goal, belongs on the playing field, not in the ideology of a nation or in the foundation of an ethical principle. Yet, as we read every day in the newspapers, competition is supposed to sustain our markets and our culture, for without it there would be no progress.
It’s not hard to remember that the misapplication of the idea of competition nearly crippled our economy in 2007. In the first years of the twenty-first century, mortgages became incredibly cheap and easy to secure. Suddenly home ownership seemed like a no-risk deal, a guaranteed return on an easy investment. Would-be home owners in hot markets—Los Angeles, Phoenix, Miami—began to buy up properties. Owning a home—and making a big profit on that home—was so easily attainable a goal that only a complete loser wouldn’t have his hand in the game and his signature on a subprime mortgage. If home owners had understood how completely corrupt the mortgage game was, they might not have felt the compulsion to jump into it. But once the idea of home ownership became competitive, all reason went out the window as the ideology of competition matured and hardened. When the available properties began to dry up and questions about real value came up, competition and panic set in—both in the bankers writing the loans and in the minds of would-be home owners. Competition—the need to keep up and hopefully best your peers—ultimately led to the implosion of the housing and mortgage markets.
There is a depressing variety of other examples of business competition having negative effects: leveraged buyouts gutting businesses and selling them for parts, setting the workers free without pay or compensation. The fossil-fuel industry, trampling over environmental concerns, is notorious for leaving a wake of toxic chemicals and debris behind to poison local communities. The ideas that more is always better, and the push for lower prices by any means necessary, is a constant mantra in our consumerist society. On a logical level most people must realize that this kind of culture is unsustainable and ultimately destructive—but it seems impossible to stop because the narrative of competition is so deeply engrained. Based on this foregone conclusion, all transgressions can be explained as a result of the incessant competition in nature.
I am preoccupied by this popular idea of competition, and what it means to us as individuals and as a culture. I am continually frustrated by the way that evolutionary science is mangled and contorted to suit the narrative that human life is some sort of playing field where only the most able and deserving competitors win privilege, wealth, esteem, or happiness. What’s worse perhaps is the faux-Darwinian belief that you can do whatever it takes to claw your way to the top rung of the ladder of success, and your ascendancy is somehow “natural” and therefore “right.” These harsh and damaging notions have no basis in evolutionary science, but rather they stem from the timeless belief in human progress.
Progress in evolution was a topic that was once very popular, but today it is a thing of the past. At the turn of the twentieth century (1900), Charles Darwin had been dead for eighteen years. Although his work in evolution had established the fact of descent with modification (or change through time of organisms along ancestral lineages), the so-called mechanism of this change, natural selection, was not well received by the vast majority of biologists. Part of the reason for the rejection was that Darwin had presented so few examples of natural selection in the wild in On the Origin of Species.157 Another problem with the acceptance of natural selection at that time was that there was no understanding of why traits in offspring are so similar to their parents. Without understanding heredity, critics could claim that adaptations came from any number of supernatural sources such as intelligent design, use and disuse of parts (Lamarckism), or conformity to some preexisting archetype in the scala naturae.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) was a French evolutionist, predating Darwin, who argued that use and disuse of organs might be the cause for evolution. The classic Lamarckian example is that the use of a neck in giraffes for obtaining high leaves drove the adaptation forward, allowing long-necked individuals who strove for the highest branches to pass along this trait to their offspring. The Scala Naturae, sometimes called the “ladder of life,” is a preevolutionary classification system based on the belief that species were defined by archetypes—ideal forms that were specially created in the mind of God. All archetypes could be arranged from low (worms and vermin) to high (humankind). Every organism could be placed somewhere neatly along the scale, in correspondence with its archetype. The scale was refined throughout the eighteenth century as more organisms were discovered, but humankind never lost its place at the top. None of the positions along the scale blended into others. Each rung of the ladder was distinct, and all species were assumed to be fixed and unchangeable.
The theory of heredity that we take so for granted today—based on the existence of DNA and the transmission of genes—was not incorporated into evolutionary theory until long after Darwin’s death. Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk who experimented with heredity in pea plants, discovered the secret of particulate inheritance (transmission of genes) essentially in an intellectual vacuum. From his garden plot at a monastery in Brno (in the present-day Czech Republic), he experimented with more than twenty-nine thousand pea plants in the 1850s and 1860s. He discovered trends in lines of crossbred peas—consistencies in the frequencies of traits such as seed shape, pod shape, and flower color—that led to the foundational principles of genetics (the law of independent assortment and the law of segregation). Although Mendel published his work in 1866, during Darwin’s lifetime, Darwin did not read the journal of the Brno Natural History Society (written in German) and remained unaware of the work for the rest of his life. Others interested in evolution at the time of its publication ignored it because the findings were presented more along the lines of a paper on hybridization rather than heredity.
Around the year 1900 Mendel’s papers were finally introduced formally into the discussion of evolution by researchers in various European countries—Hugo de Vries in the Netherland, Erich Tschermak in Austria, and Karl Correns in Germany. Each published independent findings on heredity, referring to, and inspired by, the work of Mendel. Now the field of evolutionary biology was poised to inflate the importance of natural selection as a law of nature that could distinguish between variant forms of hereditary materials. This marked the birth of the neo-Darwinians, those evolutionary biologists who put an overt emphasis on natural selection as the primary driver of evolution.158
Darwin would have found it remarkable that his name was attached to such a view as this. His theory of heredity, finally published as a provisional hypothesis in 1868,159 was called pangenesis, and it was anything but particulate inheritance. It relied on blended molecules called “gemmules,” for which there was no evidence, but these particles were a milieu from millions of sources within the body. Gemmules circulated throughout the body, picking up even smaller molecules along the way. Each organ was said to “cast off” gemmules (in Darwin’s words). Every cell in the body gave off gemmules that eventually came to rest in the eggs and sperm. The sexual act, then, blended and transmitted gemmules from both parents. Offspring were thus the result of a blending inheritance, a mixture of traits from the gemmules of the father and those of the mother. Furthermore, these traits might be affected by the environment because the gemmules would come from many cells that came into contact with the surroundings of the parents. What’s more, certain traits were enhanced by greater use. More gemmules would be created by organs that were used often in life while disuse led to degenerate organs.
Reading the passage on gemmules from Darwin’s provisional theory of pangenesis is eye-opening because it is written with the same style and air of authority as many of his most important observations. But it is all speculation and imaginative, with no basis in what we now know to be fact. No evidence has ever been found that supports the existence of Darwin’s gemmules or anything like them. Today we know that the germ cells (sperm and egg) carry information (in DNA) that will be passed along to every cell in the body. There is a complete separation in function and formation of the somatic cells (body cells) and the germ cells. Blending between the two does not occur.
The division of germ cells and somatic cells was known shortly after Darwin’s death, and it was due in large part to the work of August Weismann in Germany during the 1890s. His germ plasm theory claimed that all the hereditary material is transmitted only in the sex cells, which are impervious to the effects of the environment or of use and disuse. In 1896 Weismann proposed his germinal selection theory, which was the founding spirit of neo-Darwinism. In this view, natural selection ultimately distinguishes between variant forms of hereditary material (good genes vs. bad genes, in today’s parlance), and, through generations of hereditary descent (passing along those good genes), produces lineages that show progressive specialization and perfection. This, then, was the explanation for the well-known phenomenon of increasing adaptive perfection—for instance, the excellent vision of the hawk is an adaptation built upon the less-well-developed eyes of its ancestors; or the large brain size of humans is a progressive development of the less-well-developed brain of our ancestors (apes). In each case natural selection seems to be working toward a goal (excellent vision, large brain) that conveniently seems to lead toward the evolution of humans. Progress, therefore, appeared to be well supported by evolutionary science, and competition was justifiably viewed as a stimulus to progress.
So, around 1900, the neo-Darwinian worldview was set for the twentieth century: Natural selection was a law-like process that affected the germ cells of every sexually reproducing organism. By this process alone, all varieties of traits could be produced, and eventually perfected. Progress was an inherent feature of natural selection. Nowhere, however, in this developing worldview was there a serious consideration of the original Malthusian principle that provided the impetus for Darwin’s (and co-discoverer Alfred Russel Wallace’s) discovery of natural selection. Although Weismann had “preserved the actuality of a struggle and a selection,”160 he had not questioned the efficacy of competition in driving the process forward, nor had any other neo-Darwinian of the early twentieth century. It was a necessary ingredient as the neo-Darwinian engine of evolution.
There were voices of dissent. For instance, the Stanford University entomologist Vernon Kellogg and his partner, Ruby Bell, published a treatise on ladybugs and other insects in 1904.161 They showed that the number of spots on the most common American species, Hippodamia convergens (the convergent lady beetle), varies significantly between zero and eighteen, with most possessing twelve spots. Furthermore, they found no fewer than eighty-four different patterns of spot formation, and no detriment to successful reproduction for any of the patterns. This finding did not correspond to a stringent natural selection. The trait was highly variable, indicating that competition, as reflected by variation in spots and patterns, was not very strong, or possibly nonexistent. Certainly the struggle-for-existence analogy—individuals fighting with one another for some reproductive advantage with respect to their color pattern—did not seem applicable.
To counter those who saw natural selection as the primary mechanism of evolution (selectionists, as Weismann and other neo-Darwinians were sometimes called), Kellogg and Bell asked why such a noticeable trait, easily spotted by bird predators, would not be tightly constrained by natural selection. If twelve spots in a particular arrangement was the average, why was such an abundance of other varieties in the population being perpetuated with impunity each generation? Their answer was that natural selection was not all-powerful, competition was not that significant, and the ladybugs (and various other insect species in their study, which showed a similar hereditary tendency toward highly variable, obvious traits) got along fine regardless of their most conspicuous variation. Where is the progress if having only six spots allows one to live as well as those with eighteen? To them, and to a relatively small dissenting choir of nonselectionist Darwinians around the turn of the century, many traits of species offer no selective advantage, and therefore render the concept of competition moot.
Although not appreciated fully at the time of its publication (1904), Kellogg and Bell’s discovery shows that natural selection is only part of the story, and that concepts of progress aren’t universally supported by evolutionary considerations. Many traits, even obvious ones, seem to be selectively neutral, meaning that no selective mechanism is in place to weed them out. They somehow avoid natural selection. Traits that have no selective value are like competitors in a contest who aren’t interested in the prize (like me when I play organized sports; I’m just participating and contributing to my own and my team’s enjoyment of the game). Despite this challenge to the importance of competition and to the efficacy of natural selection, the neo-Darwinian worldview—that natural selection acts ultimately on the hereditary material to produce all traits—was already well-established in the first decades of the twentieth century, and it was on its way to becoming even more popular.
The 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s saw an increasing sophistication of evolutionary science from the application of mathematical approaches to heredity and natural selection. Mendelian inheritance supplied the variables (different varieties of genes), natural selection supplied the adaptive mechanism. Both were subject to mathematical treatments that produced satisfying models for the evolutionary process. During this time, evolution became characterized as a “change in the genetic composition of populations.”162 Natural selection could now be explained mathematically, using relatively few variables, as nonrandom, differential survival and reproduction of individuals (reflected by the genes they carry). Theorists had worked hard during these decades of the twentieth century to whittle down the list of variables considered important in the evolutionary process.163 Competition, however, still formed the underlying assumption that drove this process forward.
This period of intellectual development in evolutionary biology is called the “evolutionary synthesis,”164 and it fostered numerous developments, including the rise of the field of population genetics (concerned with the quantification and modeling of a population’s genetic makeup); the discovery of small mutations as contributors to a population’s normal range of variation; and, important for our discussion, the rejection of progressive and purposive explanations for evolution. The restricted list of variables considered important for evolution were things like mutation rates, size of breeding population, amount of genetic variation, and so on. All these things were subject to experimentation, and were malleable to some degree in laboratory conditions. The field of evolutionary biology turned a corner, and researchers focused less on trying to find evidence of purpose or progress in nature, and more on which empirical variables were the most important in the origin of species.
Through this period and into the 1960s, the neo-Darwinian approach was the only game in town. With all the data coming in from new discoveries about DNA and genes, natural selection as a sole, unwavering mechanism that distinguished between slightly favorable and slightly deleterious mutations served the mathematical models well. In turn, these models produced satisfying results that verified the effectiveness of natural selection in producing adaptive traits. One would think that something critical of competition might come out of this period. But in fact, just the opposite occurred. Competition hardened as the underlying mechanism of natural selection. All other theories of evolution were eliminated from the table of discussion, leaving only mutation and natural selection as the mechanisms of change through time. Competition now became even more important. For without slight variations competing for some adaptive purpose, what is selection acting on?
Other studies began to surface, however, that focused on the widespread abundance of trivial characters—traits passed from parents to offspring but clearly not contributing to any adaptive purpose. For example, two bird species that are closely related, and overlap in geographic range, are the song sparrow (Melospiza melodia) and the swamp sparrow (Melospiza georgiana) of eastern North America. Although they have slightly different habits, they are very difficult to tell apart. Individuals from either species show similar feather markings, a dark eye stripe, two facial stripes below the eye, and white feathers on the throat. One of the only distinguishing marks is the slightly reddish hue of the swamp sparrow’s cap, while the song sparrow’s cap is slightly more brownish. But it takes an expert to make this distinction out in the field. There are no adaptive explanations for the slight difference in color that distinguishes these species. Another North American example is the woodpecker-like common flicker (Colaptes auratus). This species occurs throughout the entire continent and is divisible into three color morphs, a yellow-shafted variety, a red-shafted variety, and a gilded variety. Each population is nearly identical in all anatomical characteristics except for distinguishing color variations on the underside of the wings. As with the trivial characters seen in sparrows, there is no adaptive advantage to having one or the other color variation. In fact the populations can interbreed, and offspring of hybrids show intermediate colors. Trivial traits such as these occur throughout the animal kingdom as well as in our own species. Can you say that there’s any adaptive advantage to any of the slight differences you notice between people you see when you’re out and about?
Natural selection could not have produced these traits, and competition cannot be invoked as any kind of mechanism in their formation. Trivial characters provide no advantage; they are selectively neutral, so they don’t originate from competitive interactions, neither do they serve the individual in its daily activities. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, more and more characters were found to be trivial. After DNA was discovered, much of it was found to have no selective value, suggesting a possible link between the ubiquity of trivial traits and their selectively neutral genes.165 There was now accumulating a larger library of empirical data and theory suggesting that natural selection was not responsible for a great many biological phenomena (contrary to the neo-Darwinian “hard” selectionist view). This gave room to the consideration that competition might not be so crucial in evolution after all.
But the general public remained blissfully unaware of all these developments. While most people had heard of genes and DNA by the 1960s, it’s safe to say that they didn’t understand the implications of the intellectual history of heredity, or the simplifying assumptions (reduction of variables) in the quantitative models underlying evolutionary theory. One might assume that the wealth of biological data collected in the twentieth century, such as the discovery of DNA, or the sequencing of the human genome, or some other major development in life science, would have contributed a clearer understanding of competition at the dawn of the twenty-first century than the one put forward two hundred years before. Sadly this assumption doesn’t hold. Except for a challenge from one emerging subfield of biology (see below), most people still cling to a forlorn belief that competition is a dominant feature of biology and human life. This might be due to the simplicity of its logic.
Competition’s role in evolutionary biology today is nearly identical to what it was in 1900: The proof that competition exists is not so much a proof of observation, but rather a proof of reasoning. It was always possible to see evidence in nature of organisms fighting one another. Naturalists had been doing it for hundreds of years—watching dominant males fighting for dominance, for the right to mate with numerous females in a harem (as seen in the deer family, for instance); or the showy displays of bright feathers, elaborate songs, and dances by male birds trying to garner the attention of much duller female birds choosing the best mate. And there was obvious interspecies warfare too—think of the predator-prey relationships mentioned earlier. These hallmarks of biological competition have never been questioned. They serve the needs of a neo-Darwinian worldview perfectly. Natural selection favors slight variations that contribute to, and actually amplify, the adaptive traits that lead to more offspring, and better-developed traits. They may be adequate examples to satisfy the neo-Darwinians, but they aren’t sufficient to answer whether competition is actually a primary cause for the entire evolutionary process.
That’s why it must be conceded that competition serves as a proof of logic more than a proof of observation. The reasoning goes like this: Overproduction of eggs and embryos coupled with a lack of space and resources for all = struggle for existence (competition). This logic seems so sound that it’s hard to see why anyone would want to criticize it. Indeed, it’s probably the least written-about, fundamental principle in the field of evolutionary biology. Nonetheless, the emergence of a new view of evolution, such as one that emphasizes symbiosis over neo-Darwinian selection, puts competition squarely in the crosshairs. Such a science has been developing since the latter third of the twentieth century (see below).
This broad overview of evolution’s intellectual history serves to show that one of the foundational concepts of the science, competition, is also one of the least scrutinized by biologists. It is an example of an underlying assumption that is so critical to the field that most people assume it must be something real, without clearly defining it. This has been called a “philosophical error” by one of the pioneers of modern biology, the late Lynn Margulis.166 Specifically, she refers to competition as a “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” a common error in science. According to the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who coined the term, it is “an accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete.”167 Competition is an abstraction. There are no units of competition to measure. It implies an agreement that opposing teams or individuals stick to in order to achieve some goal. For competition to make sense in modern biology there has to be clear-cut adaptive goals for every trait observable, and this clearly is not the case, as outlined above.
Today, natural selection and mutation are the standard explanation for evolutionary phenomena. Mutation is the “raw material,” the ultimate source of variation in the organism, upon which natural selection operates to choose the most favorable genes. The hardening of this neo-Darwinian view, the creative application of it to human life (by particular scientists), and the rise of “popular science” in the mass media over the last forty years, created an awareness about genes and natural selection in the general public. The evolutionist Richard Dawkins had a profound effect on popularizing the neo-Darwinian worldview. His books, including The Selfish Gene (1976), The Extended Phenotype (1982), The Blind Watchmaker (1986), and The God Delusion (2006), have sold millions of copies. He has appeared countless times on national television in the United States and his native England, explaining the fundamentals of evolution, always with an emphasis on the gene as the target of natural selection. His coining of the term “meme,” as a selfish replicating element of the mind, has become a colloquialism of pop culture, is now an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, and is used ubiquitously in magazine articles, newspapers, and blogs to denote any idea that has “gone viral” on the Internet. As a popularizer of evolution, he has served a valuable role in raising an important science to the level of a public conversation. He has consistently defended science in the face of attacks from religious conservatives who would rather see evolution removed from school curricula. And yet his version of neo-Darwinism that has become popularized and accepted by the public—based on replicating elements (genes, memes, or individuals) acting in their own self-interest—perpetuates the misplaced importance of competition at the root of everything. Despite the fallacy of misplaced concreteness attributed to competition, the tradition begun by Weismann is little altered after 115 years, and has now crept into the consciousness of average citizens and intellectuals alike.
The biologist Lynn Margulis and her endosymbiotic theory ushered in a challenge to the popular view that everything is explainable as selfish genes and natural selection. She emphasized the ubiquity of symbiosis, and pointed to the fact that all familiar organisms are in fact amalgamations of genomes from different organisms. This implies a biosphere of interconnected populations and networks of organisms rather than one of constant warfare and self-interested individuals. What are the roles of competition and natural selection in this view? Clearly, the neo-Darwinian view of natural selection acting on individuals for the benefit of the genes they carry has to be deemphasized. In the alternative view of Margulis, natural selection is reframed as a measure of ecosystem efficiency (communities of interacting species). The biosphere itself is a selector, not of individuals, but of more efficient or less efficient communities.
This web of interdependence gives us a reason to make decisions that are good for the environment, and gives us a justification for taking care of our cohorts. In short it takes the emphasis off shortsighted selfish objectives that come from the belief in competition. In such a worldview we can restore competition to its rightful place—a defined contest for an agreed-upon goal rather than the driving force behind all human conflict, prosperity, and misfortune. But also we can see evolution in a more positive light, not as a brutal war of competing individuals but as a product of symbiotic relationships. The biosphere that we depend on also depends on us. This realization provides the impetus to act as caretakers, not only of other people, species, and ecosystems, but also of ourselves. In order to achieve any of this, however, we first have to come to terms with what we can and cannot control.