Page 5 - DARWIN AND THE HUMAN FUTURE

And so there it was—the fact that in 800 pages of fine print, of “survival of the fittest” Darwin wrote only twice , once to regret ever using the damned phrase.In shock I tried for what seemed the most fitting of likely polar opposites. And found he’d written 95 times about love But what about the “selfish gene” and all the best-selling books with the booming new focus on selfishness that were adding a sharp new cutting edge to “survival of the fittest?”Of selfishness I found that Darwin had not only written only six times. In a veritable roar out of a long ignored page in Descent, he called selfishness “a base principle” accounting for “the low morality of savages.”And what might be the polar opposite to selfishness? Certainly most logical would be the caring for others—or the driver of moral behavior we call altruism . And of everything to do with the word altruism—i.e., moral sensitivity, moral belief, the moral evolution of ours and preceding species— I found Darwin had written 92 times Of competition I found he’d written 12 times, but of cooperation (called mutual aid in his time) over twice as many times, with 27 entries.In The Descent of Man there was this further amazement. Here was this book that for over 100 years has been routinely probed by the fierce guardians of the language, methodologies, and mindset of traditional biology—as well as all the fierce guardians of the humanities. And for the first time I saw the split in mindset that both separates and drives us. I saw the gulf between the Gatekeepers and the Gatebreakers that for over a century5