The How to Harness the Power of Evolution, Physics, and Economics to Achieve Business Success

1 The Universe Is Run by Selection If I could give an award for the best idea ever I would give it to Darwin, because his idea unites in a stroke these two completely disparate worlds, until then, of the meaningless mechanical physical sciences, astronomy, physics and chemistry on the one side, and the world of meaning, culture, art and biology. daniel dennett Evolution by Natural Selection In the material world, nothing is more important than evolution by natural selection. Without natural selection, our species could not exist. If selection did not apply to ideas, technologies, markets, companies, teams, and products in precisely the same way as it applies to species, we would all be working on the land struggling to avoid malnutrition and famine. Selection drives all material progress. The Origins of Darwinism In the 1830s, both during his long trip around the world and when back in England, Darwin observed the behavior of animals that favored the survival of themselves and their offspring. For example, when in the Gal'pagos archipelago in the South Pacific in 1835, Darwin noted that a certain white bird would calmly sit by while the first of its hatchlings killed the second. Why did the bird not intervene--or, if she wanted only one hatchling, why bother to lay more than one egg? Repeated observation gave Darwin the answer: he determined that a single egg gave only a 50 percent survival rate (survival being defined as that of at least one hatchling), that two eggs raised the survival rate to 70 percent, but that three eggs brought the survival rate below 50 percent. Further, if there were two live hatchlings, the probability of one of them surviving was lower than if there was only one hatchling. Hence the mother's apparently perverse behavior was actually conducive to the survival of her family. Darwin combined observations from his field research with two ideas that had been around for many decades in different academic disciplines, and fused them together with explosive effect. The two ideas were competition and evolution. Darwin first thought of natural selection in 1838 while reading Thomas Robert Malthus's Essay on Population, a dire prophecy of the effects of competition between individuals for food. Malthus in turn had been influenced by Adam Smith's theories of economic competition in The Wealth of Nations, the first volume of which had been published in 1776. Smith's thinking had been influenced by a writer another century or so earlier, namely the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who had in 1651 described society as "the war of all against all."1 This means the idea of competition was common currency among intellectuals almost two hundred years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Evolution had also been widely discussed in the early nineteenth century. Fossils showed that species had evolved from earlier, more primitive species. K. E. von Baer (1792-1876) revealed a major key to the process when he stated that "less general characters are developed from the most general, until the most specialised appear."2 Evolutionists talked about "heterogeneity emerging from homogeneity."3 What no one before Darwin had explained satisfactorily was how evolution worked. Natural Selection Darwin's theory of natural selection is elegant and extremely economical, resting on three plain observations. First, creatures systematically overproduce their young. "There is no exception to the rule," Darwin states, "that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair." He observes that cod produce millions of eggs. If they all survived, the oceans would be solid cod within six months. Elephants areKoch, Richard is the author of 'The How to Harness the Power of Evolution, Physics, and Economics to Achieve Business Success' with ISBN 9780385501590 and ISBN 0385501595.