Only the Pronoid Survive

If today's businesses were more immersed in the gift economy and less steeped in the transaction culture, would we see more goods and services like Linux? Cronin says that the minute you introduce money, you turn off the altruism gene. It doesn't disappear from people's character, it disappears from the transaction. And often -- as with the British blood bank -- it impoverishes the transaction.

Altruism fundamentally changes economic and competitive equations: Observers say that the biggest threat to Microsoft is not the U.S. Department of Justice but the growing freeware movement. Under the new rules of freeware, Linux rewards its network of elite programmers not with pay but with prestige; the richest developer is not the greediest but the one with the best reputation. In 1976, Bill Gates accused the freeware movement of shoddiness. He wanted to know, "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?" But today, although its overall market share is small, Linux presents an interesting competitive scenario: Say, for instance, that China adopts Linux as its countrywide operating system. "Then," says one observer, "whoever owns China, will own the software business. Even software pirates prefer not to steal but to take what's free."

Such changes are fresh and are still taking shape. And they challenge the conventional wisdom of competition. They also make most high-testosterone businessmen very uncomfortable. Nicholas Humphrey is a Darwinist at the London School of Economics. Wherever he looks in the culture of business, Humphrey sees the discomfort and disorientation that generosity can cause. "An IBM spokesman came to my child's nursery school several years ago," Humphrey says. "He said, 'We are not giving money to this school out of altruism. Every penny has an intent of enlightened self-interest.' Somewhere this man was told, 'Don't admit that anything you do is motivated by anything other than self-interest.' He felt that he had to apologize on behalf of IBM for giving the school a gift."

Management guru Peter Drucker offered the bottom line on a company's purpose in the old economy: to make a profit. Today, even profits have become a less-compelling way to keep score than intangible values, such as share of mind, strength of relationships, or loyalty of employees. These days, having a compelling story can be just as important as having a compelling product. The bottom line is not a single number, but more an emotion, a mind-set, a credible promise. The transaction economy is changing into a gift economy. And in the process, we're learning to reinterpret Darwin's fundamental lessons.

Darwin in Love

Flash back to 1831: Charles Darwin, 22, is the troublesome son of a father who predicts that his boy will amount to nothing more than "a rat catcher." He leaves his father's bruising opinions and goes looking for something to do with his life.

He travels to the Galápagos Islands -- and he can hardly believe what he sees. It looks like paradise. The finches have no fear of humans. They land on Darwin as if he were a tree. They catch themselves in his hat. The man who will become one of the greatest scientists of the millennium is so bewitched by his surroundings that he succumbs to a form of poetry: He claims to know what the rocks and animals are thinking. He pulls the tail of one burrowing creature. "At this, it was greatly astonished and shuffled up to see what was the matter," Darwin wrote, "and then stared me in the face, as much to say, 'What made you pull my tail?' " Enchanted by the scenes, he called the islets "a center of creation."

Flash ahead to the last days of the 20th century and the early days of the digital economy. The Internet is a new locus of creation: Teeming life. Spiraling evolution. Exotic species. Enchanted islands. It's the perfect place for the unselfish gene to undergo a massive thrust in evolution: a step change, an evolutionary twist in which nature is redirected and behavior changes.

For years, scientists have recorded step changes in evolution. Before the Industrial Revolution, for example, the predominant color of moths was a light peppered form recorded in 1848, in Manchester, England, a center for the new manufacturing economy. As factories grew, a population of darker moths soon increased in frequency. By 1950, a mere 100 years later, dark moths made up more than 90% of the moth population. In the world of science, that's a sudden and dramatic evolutionary change. The Darwinian change agent: birds hunting by sight. Darker moths were better disguised on tree trunks covered by the soot of the new factories, and thus, they were not so easily eaten by birds.

Then, something truly bizarre happened: House cats got darker, too. Not because birds preyed on them, but because the darker color protected them from the increased radiation that resulted from the pollution. The Darwinian lesson has less to do with survival of the fittest and more to do with how change happens in nature: Once evolution enters a step change, most everything gets caught up in its influence. Eventually, the future shows up everywhere.

To Cronin and her colleagues, a similar evolutionary shift is now taking place with the altruism gene. Altruism, which literally means "concern for the other," has been recessive for most of history. The new economy makes it recessive no longer.