Only the Pronoid Survive

It was the kind of situation in which a dog might have understandably wanted to eat another dog. The month was January, the year was 1999, and the crown princes and princesses of the largest companies in the world had gathered for a little skiing, a little socializing, a little polite conversation, and a little dabbling in the latest, most provocative ideas -- something they do every year at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland.

But this year, it was snowing like mad -- too much for skiing, too depressing for socializing, and almost too cold for politeness. Hell in this Swiss mountain town was beginning to take on a whiter shade of pale. The meeting rooms started getting colder. Then the portions at dinner started getting smaller. All of a sudden, the lights went out all over town -- and you could almost feel the question being asked by the rich, the privileged, the powerful: What happens now? Any hypercompetitive, only-the-strong-survive, entrepreneurially minded capitalist could be excused for hoarding food, defending prime territory, and knocking off competitors. Or would he?

In this setting of surplus-turned-to-scarcity, Helena Cronin, 57, philosopher, social scientist, and codirector of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics, delivered her scheduled lecture on the survival of the fittest: "Look carefully at nature, and you will find that it doesn't always seem short, brutish, and savage," she told the cold, hungry moguls. "Animals are strikingly unselfish, giving warnings of predators, sharing food, grooming one another, adopting orphans, fighting without killing -- or injuring -- their adversaries. In some ways, they behave more like moral paragons of Aesop than the hard-bitten, self-seeking individualists that natural selection seems to favor."

The environment was decidedly cold, but Cronin warmed to her theme. "It turns out," she told the assembled kill-or-be-killed crowd, "that you can actually prosper more by entering into relationships of reciprocation, so that you're both getting more than either of you would have gotten separately."

The lecture was not what anyone expected. But in those dark moments of the soul, Cronin offered a way of coping with shared adversity, a new school of competitive thinking based on the notion of an unselfish gene. Her ideas are a more challenging line of thought and a more accurate reflection of how the world works than the view popularized by Intel's Andy Grove that "only the paranoid survive."

Cronin's version of Darwinism shows that altruism and generosity create more rewards than their opposites do. She introduced the CEOs to the flip side of paranoia: "pronoia" -- the idea that everyone is not out to get you, but that they are out to love you, or at least to appreciate you, if you reciprocate. According to the new Darwinism, only the pronoid survive -- in fact, only the pronoid endure and flourish.

The really bizarre thing is that this belief comes from a bona fide Darwinist -- and wasn't Darwin the top dog in the high court of Canine v. Canine? Wasn't he the pseudoeconomist of choice in the greed-is-good 1980s, offering justification for the decade of financial reengineering? Wasn't Darwin the pseudosociologist of choice in the Reagan years, providing a fig leaf of intellectual cover for social policies that asserted that poverty was a sign of an individual's unwillingness to evolve to some higher economic ground?

But that was then, and this is now. As we enter a new millennium, a new generation of Darwinists, with Helena Cronin at the lead, is turning those 1980s beliefs upside down. Today, Cronin is saying, "Yes, but ..." What if being the fittest means having the most generosity of spirit? What if enhancing your chance of survival comes from improving your capacity to be altruistic?

Cronin has spent the past 20 years carefully rereading the work of Charles Darwin, showing that most of what we believe about his theories is wrong. "Darwin himself said that the war of nature 'is not incessant' and that 'the happy survive and multiply,'" Cronin says. Read Darwin's own fieldwork: He recorded dozens of examples of animals engaged in self-sacrifice. Why, Cronin asks, did Darwin note countless instances of an animal giving up its time, its food, its mate -- even its life -- to help others? Because, Cronin answers, that kind of behavior is smart evolution: It results in greater rewards.

Dusting off the lies from Darwin's principles can be the best thing believers in the power of ideas can do. What we presume to be the theory of survival of the fittest is probably the oldest story we tell ourselves about success. We grow up believing that it's a jungle out there. We learn that to survive, we must become "natural-born killers." So Cronin's radical rethinking of Darwinism goes against the grain and yet proves to be essential, especially now. At a moment when most accepted wisdom is up for grabs -- when Karl Marx is dead, Sigmund Freud is finished, and a "new physics" is looking very old -- only Darwin promises insight into our work and our future. But we need to know the real Darwin. And the real Darwin says that the paranoid may survive, but only the pronoid succeed.