Free No Contest by Alfie Kohn Page A

theory—which are addressed in the last section of this chapter. I am not aware of any serious arguments for competition’s inevitability explicitly offered from within these fields, however.
    20. David W. and Roger T. Johnson, “Instructional Goal Structure: Cooperative, Competitive, or Individualistic” (hereafter “Structure”), p. 218.
    21. Ashley Montagu cited in Johnson and Johnson, “Cooperation in Learning: Ignored But Powerful,” p. 1. Psychiatrist Roderic Gorney agrees: “Any objective appraisal of modern man will disclose that in the overwhelming preponderance of human interactions cooperation
completely overshadows
competition” (
Human Agenda,
pp. 101–2; his emphasis). See also Arthur W. Combs,
Myths in Education,
pp. 15–17.
    22. “Aggression, anxiety, guilt, and self-centered motives and behavior have been so much the cloth of theory and research that questions of a ‘softer’ side of young human beings seem almost unscientific” (Marian Radke Yarrow et al., “Learning Concern for Others,” p. 240).
    23. For example, see H. L. Rheingold and D. F. Hay, “Prosocial Behavior of the Very Young”; Marian Radke Yarrow and Carolyn Zahn Waxier, “The Emergence and Functions of Prosocial Behaviors in Young Children”; Yarrow et al., “Learning Concern”; James H. Bryan, “Prosocial Behavior”; Maya Pines, “Good Samaritans at Age Two?”; and my own “That Loving Feeling—When Does It Begin?” Yarrow and Waxier write as follows: “The capabilities for compassion, for various kinds of reaching out to others in a giving sense are viable and effective responses early in life. . . . Very young children were often finely discriminative and responsive to others’ need states” (pp. 78–79).
    24. Rheingold and Hay, p. 101. On the other hand, Roderic Gorney claims that the view “that human beings are predisposed to be not individualistic and competitive but social and cooperative . . . [is] endorsed by the majority of students of human social biology and evolution”
(Human Agenda,
p. 140). Also see Martin L. Hoffman, “Is Altruism Part of Human Nature?”
    25. Richard Hofstadter,
Social Darwinism in American Thought,
p. 204.
    26. Stephen Jay Gould, personal communication, 1984.
    27. Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species,
Chapter III, p. 62. Thus, Patrick Bateson writes that “the restriction of differential survival to mean simply conflict is an obvious abuse of Darwin’s thinking” (“Cooperation and Competition,” p. 55).
    28. George Gaylord Simpson,
The Meaning of Evolution,
p. 222. Similarly, Ashley Montagu writes: “Natural selection . . . has been rather more operative in terms of co-operation than it has been in terms of what is generally understood by competition. . . . Natural selection through ‘competition’ may secure the immediate survival of certain types of ‘competitors,’ but the survivors would not long survive if they did not co-operate”
(Darwin, Competition and Cooperation,
pp. 70, 72).
    29. Petr Kropotkin,
Mutual Aid,
pp. 74–75; emphasis in original.
    30. A revised version of W. C. Allee’s
The Social Life of Animals
.
    31. Montagu lists some fifty books and articles in
Darwin,
pp. 35–37.
    32. Marvin Bates,
The Nature of Natural History
, quoted in Montagu, ibid., p. 58. William Patten’s better known
The Grand Strategy of Evolution
summarized it as follows: “There is but one creative process common to all phases of evolution, inorganic, organic, mental, and social. That process is best described by the term cooperation, or mutual service” (p. 33). See also Roderic Gorney’s
Human Agenda,
esp. pp. 100–101, and Lewis Thomas’s
The Lives of a Cell
. Even on the genetic level, Patrick Bateson points out that “the perpetuation of each gene