The Empathetic Gene a salute to Elizabeth Gilbert and her novel — The Signature of All Things
Ms. Gilbert, after reading your wonderful novel “The Signature Of All Things” I am buoyed up in my belief in things liberal and progressive. You tell a tale of a woman investigating the forces of life, including her own. You make fascinating even the story of mosses competing for resources. But is nature about ‘tooth and claw’?
It is more effective and productive to multiply abundance than to divide scarcity.
The narrative about how life has evolved on this planet has been steered by men. It seems important to men to identify with creatures that battle for survival. So other techniques that may be equally effective, especially for increasing survival for whole communities, may not seem so appealing to male theorists.
Even Ms. Gilbert in her book brushes right by the strategies of women in managing often contentious groups of offspring (many not their own). While many fathers will say they will die for their children, it is women, despite their critical role as nurturers, who will put themselves in peril to preserve their offspring. Women also value the capability of other women to maintain the community. They see the value of cooperation in virtually every endeavor. Empathetic communication is critical to this process.
Here’s a simple experiment: In a working environment of any sort, ask, “Who likes you and who do you like, and how important is that to getting your work done?” I would bet that for the majority of women the question would be important and for most of the men much less so.
So in a very broad way we seem to have a regular battle between the politics of men and the politics of women, or the competitive gene and the cooperative gene. Curiously, Karl Marx, in fighting for communism was illustrating the importance of competitive initiative. The U. S. founding fathers, in drawing up a constitution that institutionalized competition between law, leadership and the populace, created a vehicle for cooperation.
The root of our decision making comes down to Darwin, Wallace, and Whittaker’s basic insight – when we perceive there are limited resources, what do we do? Fight to corner them, or cooperate to increase and share them? The latter requires thought and communication and the courage to give up some personal desires.
It is disturbing that scarcity of resources is a trigger at the dawn of living things. Who out there has insight into what was so scarce in that early crackle of amino acids resulting in proteins and single cell plants that conflict and cooperation was built into the very design of life?
Last Quarter 
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