Only the Pronoid Survive

For her part, Cronin used her gender to her advantage -- that, "and doing things in the decent, right way," she says. "If I were a man, I would not have the luxury of being able to behave in noncompetitive ways. Most men couldn't afford to do what I'm doing, because it wouldn't affirm their careers, and it wouldn't show up well in a competitive arena. I have the luxury of not needing to do that, partly because I'm not driven the way they are. I've never had a career. Things just happen to me." She has evolved, much as Darwin's own discoveries had evolved. "I think of my career as a series of contingencies. I see it as a fortuitous stumbling onto things that were worthwhile, without seeking them out."

In 1995, Cronin enjoyed another fortuitous stumble, founding "Darwin@LSE," an interdisciplinary program that has become the hottest salon in England. It attracts writers like A.S. Byatt and Ian McEwan, scientists like Paul Davis, and others who gather to debate the truth as Darwinists interpret it. Structurally, Darwin@LSE is a study in the gift economy of altruism. "We were desperately underfunded," Cronin says. "I wrote to the world's best scholars and asked them to appear for free, not even offering to pay for expenses. Everyone I approached found the money, rearranged their schedules, and appeared. People who normally were paid thousands of dollars a lecture would say, 'I have gone out of my way because it's a worthwhile cause, done with commitment, integrity, and good feeling.'"

Cronin's approach shows the limits of competitive strategy for building careers and institutions, along with the evolving alternative: cooperative strategy. "If I had set out to start Darwin@LSE, I don't know if it would have been such a success," she says. "I set out to start a seminar with the best people and no money at all. It turned out that the best people wanted to take part. How do you plan something like that? Typically, you go out, get an administrator, and raise money. But if I'd gone that route, I wonder if people would have responded in the same way. Everything was done by me, from securing hotel rooms to buying candles for dinner. Because of that, I gathered lots of voluntary help, which I've still got. If I had money to pay for everything, who would have volunteered?" It's the story of the blood bank, applied to Cronin's own undertaking.

In fact, Cronin applies the same thinking to her own career choices: what she thinks about and how she spends her time. "It would have been better for my career if I had written another book," she says candidly. "But it's been better for Darwin's theory for me to have founded Darwin@LSE."

The Sobriety of the Gene

Management depends on changing people's behavior. In a Darwinian worldview, however, people cannot change. "It is important to know what is fundamental to us as evolved animals, so that we don't waste our efforts trying to change what we cannot change," says Cronin. "People can't be managed, but systems can be altered to take advantage of the behavior that begins in our brains. When you know what you can control versus what you cannot control, that allows you degrees of freedom. You can't change human behavior, but you can change the conditions in which you work and the policies that you create to elicit a certain kind of human response."

It's a sobering thought, but whether you see it as imprisoning or as liberating depends on your worldview. "My younger students get very depressed studying Darwin," says Nigel Nicholson, a Darwinist at the London Business School. "They think he robs them of their free will by arguing that genes define behavior. But my older students love Darwin. They are at the point in life where they see that control counts for little, that there are larger forces determining who we are and how we act."

How different would the world be if neo-Darwinism held sway? Here are some of Cronin's insights about the intersection of human behavior, business practices, and neo-Darwinism:

Forget romantic love. Darwinists believe that everything starts with the force of the genes. Romantic love is just the desire of genes to be passed down from one generation to the next. Females are attracted to males who are able to secure family resources; males, meanwhile, look for signs of female reproductive health -- which in humans is best determined by a formula: waist size that is one-third of hip size. The arts of all kinds -- poetry, music, theater -- are like the peacock's tail: displays of virtuosity or of desirability that lead to sex.

Psychology isn't sustaining. "Freudian theory makes no sense," Cronin insists. "Why on Earth should you carry into your adulthood childhood incidents that influence your behavior? There are no adaptive reasons for this." On the other hand, there are very sound Darwinian explanations that connect lessons learned in early childhood to personal decisions made in adulthood. For example, a woman who was brought up by a mother who had no male support might decide to have children early in life, because she doesn't see herself as having a long or comfortable reproductive future. But in Darwinism, such behavior is adaptive, not neurotic.