Timing is everything, in science just as much as in horseracing or playing the stock market. If Alfred Russell Wallace had published before Darwin, we would talk about Wallace’s Theory of Evolution today.
Between the growing environmental crisis, extreme economic inequality and global poverty, a long list of social needs that are unfunded, or underfunded, and, not least, the dysfunctional or corrupt political regimes in many countries, our species is in genuine peril. And it’s entirely a self-made crisis. Yet this is precisely why there is reason for hope.
Peter Corning is currently the Director of the Institute for the Study of Complex Systems in Seattle, Washington. He was also once a science writer at Newsweek and a professor for many years in the Human Biology Program at Stanford University, along with holding a research appointment in Stanford’s Behavior Genetics Laboratory.
Let’s begin with some political theory. Aristotle, in his great treatise, the Politics, concluded that there are, basically, only two different kinds of governments in terms of the outcomes for a society — those that serve the common good, or the public interest, and those that have been co-opted to serve the self-interests of the people who hold political power.
