Richard Dawkins – The Genius of Darwin: 2
In this second part of the series Dawkins progresses from the origin of species to the descent of man and what we know today about its implications.
He points out that as a program for living Darwinism is usually abhorrent, but that from Social Darwinists to Libertarians, kin selection and the resultant emergence of altruism as a natural outcome, has been ignored.
His point about Enron is especially pertinent: by periodically culling the people who they believed were the bottom 15% of performers, they encouraged individual ruthlessness rather than team players who would benefit the company as a whole, at the expense of their individual performance. Enron’s selection methods were unnatural rather than natural, and open to error of judgment. Unnatural selection was well known to animal breeders, centuries before Darwinism, but Natural Selection is different, there is no purpose and therefore no possible ideological attachment.
(This is the first of 5 parts of the second program in the series)