HUM 202 — Toward a Literacy of Cooperation
This link was sent by Andrew Garton of Toysatellite. It concerns a lecture series at Stanford University about the history of cooperation (as apposed to ‘Darwins blind spot’ being his theory of natural selection). It proposes that the history of evolution overlooks the history of coopertaion (and ‘cooperation’ is what Sociologists call ‘Social Capital’).
Darwin had a blind spot. It wasn’t that he didn’t see the role of cooperation in evolution. He just didn’t see how important it is. So for two centuries — a time during which the world passed from an agrarian landscape into a global post-industrial culture of unprecedented scale and complexity — science, society, public policy and commerce have attended almost exclusively to the role of competition. The stories people tell themselves about what is possible, the mythical narratives that organizations and societies depend upon, have been variations of “survival of the fittest.” The role of cooperation has been largely unmapped.