Competition Is for Losers

By Frank Hynes

The title of this article will appear as anathema for the millions of us who have been accustomed to hearing the aggressive management-speak of the last twenty or so years this is so often fond of paraphrasing the principals of Darwinian evolution into distorted cliche's like 'only the strongest survive'. We have been so bludgeoned by endless repetition of this dogma that few of us are capable of questioning it, but the time to question it is now. Evolutionary Biology, like its subject matter, has not stood still this last few decades, and theoreticians of all hues are developing a deeper understanding of what it means to compete, and when it's an optimal strategy, and when it's not - when co-operation can trump it.

This is a complex area so we'll do well to clean up one or two of the most common mistaken beliefs about evolution before we can build on a more solid foundation. Evolution doesn't give a damn about successfully competing individuals. Think about a disease that overwhelms its host and kills it, then the virus that caused the disease dies too, having no host left to live on. The virus population sure was successful in overwhelming the host's immune system, so how come its reward for doing so well is its own extinction? Obviously the answer lies in understanding what really wins, and the answer is the virus as a species, or put more broadly, the virus as a group. During the period it was active in an infected host, that host will have been spreading the disease, the virus jumps hosts, maybe even jumps species, as it's spread continues to grow. What does it matter to evolution if every successful instance of it dies off? Not at all, given that the total virus population is growing ever bigger. Evolution doesn't care about the individual. If only those overly ambitious executives had understood that, they would perhaps have indulged in their self serving 'survival of the fittest' mantra a little less often and spent more time worrying about how extra-vulnerable their failure to grasp the subtleties of what it means to be 'fittest' actually made them.

So where does this leave us, as both individuals and as a society? The answer is both shocking and yet, once it has been introduced and adequately explained, shockingly obvious. New developments in Evolutionary Biology have brought such specialists to the attention of Economists, who are keen to explore the relationship between economic growth and evolutionary theory, and the extent to which biological models can predict the success of failure of various economic strategies. The findings have implications that extend far beyond the sphere of economics and into everyday life. Our society can be most usefully understood not as billions of individuals, but as millions of groups of varying sizes. We are each of us a member of at least one group: we are part of our employers business, we are part of our running club, we are part of our township, and so on. In most cases, each of these groups is competing with similar groups for scarce resources. So which of these groups is most likely to succeed? To learn the answer we need to consider how the groups are variously constituted. Some will be made up of competing individuals. Others will be made up of co-operating individuals. Unsurprisingly perhaps, it turns out that the groups made up of co-operating individuals always out-perform groups that are made up of competing individuals, because the co-operating individuals function more efficiently as a group - and here we are once more, witnessing the group, not the individual, as the only unit of currency that counts in terms of evolution.

There is a kind of 'trickle down effect' that is taking this awareness from the giddy heights of high finance, where the realisation that the dog-eat-dog model of traditional capitalism might not necessarily be the healthiest schema for a robust economy to hinge on, into smaller groups, like the neighbourhood and the family unit. Sharing is becoming the strategy of choice in enjoying limited resources, and while the acquisitive, possessive imperative that we used to take for granted is starting to come into question, people are finding the idea of pooling anything from land to skill sets to possessions to be a new and exciting way of getting things done. They are half right. As a model of social and economic exchange it used to be known as barter, but while a superficial analysis might assume we are turning full circle, the truth is that we, as a society, are simply responding to change in the most adaptive, most appropriate way possible. Sharing things makes sense in a world we are starting to see as really quite small and really so finite in its capacity to feed our demands, and this is perfect, because sharing requires co-operation and co-operation trumps competition, every time.