Sublime

Maximize your evolution.

No other work of mine was begun in so deductive a spirit as this, for the whole theory was thought out on the west coast of South America, before I had seen a true coral reef. I had therefore only to verify and extend my views by a careful examination of living reefs.

“The Evolution of Altruistic Behavior.”

as Darwin himself understood, webs of collaboration and open exchange have always been central to evolutionary progress, never more so than in the history of our intensely social species.

Darwin provided a proto-description of ecology, describing an ‘entangled bank’, wherein plants of many kinds, birds, insects and other ‘elaborately constructed forms, so different from one another’ were produced by the complex forces of evolution, yet depended utterly on one another.

Capitalism is Darwinian in the true sense; not the cheap line about ‘survival of the fittest’, but the ability to adapt to different and surprising circumstances – and stay the course.

I gained much by my delay in publishing from about 1839, when the theory was clearly conceived, to 1859; and I lost nothing by it, for I cared very little whether men attributed most originality to me or Wallace; and his essay no doubt aided in the reception of the theory.