Generosity -- A Strategy for Survival

Helena Cronin, 64, philosopher, social scientist, and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics, has a different take on the survival of the fittest: "Look carefully at nature, and you will find that it doesn't always seem short, brutish, and savage. Animals are strikingly unselfish.” Cronin offers 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 instead talks about "pronoia" -- the idea that altruism and generosity create more rewards than their opposites do.

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