From DOMINIC BELFIELD
How strange that Linda Gamlin should castigate the preface of The Greenpeace
Book of Dolphins (Review, 13 April) for declaring that ‘cooperation, not
competition, is the secret of survival’.
Does Gamlin therefore think that Lynn Margulis, Distinguished Professor
of Botany at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has similar ‘romantic
New Age notions masquerading as science’ when she writes in her book Microcosmos:
Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution (with Dorian Sagan, Allen and
Unwin, 1987): ‘ . . . the view of evolution as chronic bloody competition
among individuals and species, a popular distortion of Darwin’s notion of
‘survival of the fittest’, dissolves before a new view of continual cooperation,
strong interaction, and mutual dependence among life forms. Life did not
take over the globe by combat, but by networking . . . ‘Survival of the
fittest’ refers not to large muscles, predatory habits, or the master’s
whip, but to leaving more offspring. The point is not so much the infliction
of death, which is inevitable, as the propagation of life, which is not’?
Can this ‘notion’ seriously be dismissed as ‘absurd and inappropriate’,
as Gamlin would have us believe? Perhaps the dolphins celebrated in Greenpeace’s
book can teach us much about ‘appropriate intelligence’-ie living with the
environment, not off it.
Dominic Belfield Sinclair Gardens London
Advertisement
