What would Darwin say?
Darwin's premise, that the 'survival of the fittest' (originally used by economist Herbert Spencer after reading Darwin's On the Origin of Species, in his Principles of Biology (1864), would come from a progressive, time-bound adaptability to change, could be proven wrong in the foreseeable decades. In our current political, social and economic - global - contexts, I'd be keen to get Darwin's, as well as Spencer's, reactions to the retrograde movements that currently afflict humanity's necessary cohesiveness. Do the following examples indicate a rise in humanity's collective stagnation? I welcome your reactions and thoughts...
DID YOU KNOW: THERE ARE FEWER WOMEN ON THE BOARDS OF S&P 500 COMPANIES THAN MEN NAMED JOHN?
DID YOU KNOW: AS EARLY AS FOURTH GRADE, GIRLS START OPTING OUT OF LEADERSHIP ROLES?
DID YOU KNOW: GLOBALLY, MEN ARE 10 TIMES MORE LIKELY TO BE HEAD OF GOVERNMENTS AND WOMEN ARE TWICE AS LIKELY TO BE DENIED BASIC ACCESS TO EDUCATION?
Why the long face Jeneva?! What retrograde movements? Donald Trump? He is a blink of a political eye, he is the one step back to the two steps forward. On practically all measures of humanity's cohesiveness and certainly on gender equality, the world is moving in the right direction. Is it progress in a straight line? No. Is it as fast as we would like? No. Should we do all we can to speed it up? Yes. But I think at times like these, it pays to have a geological time frame to human behavioural development. Anything else sets us up for disappointment. Far from 'collective stagnation' we are on an exponential curve to equality. This may not happen in our life times but happen it will ...
Strategic Business Director
8 年Good question. this is my meditation on Darwin and our predicament. Natural systems regulate toward equilibrium. All things equal. sans an external shock (like a meteor smashing into earth causing extinction of species), species tend to regulate toward equilibrium in a shared ecology. The story of the reintroduction of wolves into National Parks is a clear remindee of this ocology. But at some point ego evolved. Ego Trumps ecology. Ego is the source of Schumpeter's creative destruction. Creative destruction feeds ago at the expense of ecology. If Darwin were here I bet he would remind us that cultural anthropologist Gregory Bateson offered humanity a meditation on 'Steps to an ecology of mind'. That meditation tries to put mind and ego back into an evolutionary function. Here innovation is about adaptation with evolution rather than a creatively destructive means to deam evolution irrelevant. I think Darwin would be challenged to see current states as stagnation of humanity but he might rather see it as innovation system that has advanced faster than our collective ability to adapt with it. To the extent that it threatens our own species he might say that 'earth and cockroaches (and maybe Keith Richards)