Free No Contest by Alfie Kohn Page B

depends on the characteristics of the gene team” (“Cooperation and Competition,” p. 55). The relative importance of competition in ecological theory is being questioned, too (see, for example, Stephen Doig, “Ecology May Never Be the Same After Daniel Simberloff,” p. 17).
    33. W. C. Allee,
Cooperation Among Animals,
p. 16. He continues: “[The roots of] an unconscious kind of mutualism . . . are deep and well established and its expression grows to be so spontaneous and normal that we are likely to overlook or forget it” (p. 176).
    34. Richard Dawkins and Garrett Hardin are examples.
    35. A similar fallacy resides in sociobiologists’ arguments about altruism, which term is likewise used in two senses. See Gunther Stent, “You Can Take the Ethics Out of Altruism But You Can’t Take the Altruism Out of Ethics.” Marshall Sahlins, in
The Use and Abuse of Biology,
and Anthony Flew, in “From Is to Ought,” make essentially the same point about confusing two levels of meaning with respect to terms like “law of nature” and “natural selection.”
    36. John A. Wiens, “Competition or Peaceful Coexistence?” p. 34.
    37. For example, Sahlins, Montagu, and Gorney. Also, Elliot Aronson suspects that “Kropotkin’s work . . . has been largely ignored, perhaps because it did not fit in with the temper of the times or with the needs of those who were profiting from the industrial revolution” (p. 153). And Richard Hofstadter: “American society saw its own image in the tooth-and-claw version of natural selection, and . . . dominant groups were therefore able to dramatize this vision of competition as a thing good in itself. Ruthless business rivalry and unprincipled politics seemed to be justified by the survival philosophy” (p. 201).
    38. Quoted in Lewontin et al., p. 309, fn. 30. The sociobiologists continue to make vigorous use of this gambit. Slavery, love, and a good many more human institutions are said to be found in other species. Consider, for example, this excerpt from Edward O. Wilson’s
On Human Nature:
“The species that have evolved long-term bonds are also, by and large, the ones that rely on elaborate courtship rituals. It is consistent with this trend that most of the pleasures of human sex constitute primary reinforcers to facilitate bonding. Love and sex do indeed go together” (pp. 146–47). Notice what he has done here: After describing a phenomenon called “bonding,” he suddenly substitutes the word “love.” Now he can proceed as if he had actually demonstrated that human love is identical to the bonding common to all animals.
    39. Montagu,
Darwin,
p. 72.
    40. Mark A. May, “A Research Note on Cooperative and Competitive Behavior,” p. 888.
    41. May and Doob cited in Emmy A. Pepitone,
Children in Cooperation and Competition: Toward a Developmental Social Psychology,
p. 14.
    42. Deutsch,
Resolution of Conflict,
p. 89.
    43. Thomas Tutko and William Bruns,
Winning Is Everything and Other American Myths,
p. 53.
    44. David Riesman, “Football in America: A Study in Culture Diffusion,” p. 252.
    45. Aronson, pp. 153, 206.
    46. Jules Henry,
Culture Against Man,
pp. 295–96.
    47. Susan Schiffer Stautberg, “The Rat Race Isn’t for Tots.” See also a
New York Times
article by Michael deCourcy Hinds: “‘There is as much pressure to get [children] into kindergarten as there will be to get them into law school’” (“Private Schools: The First Steps”). “Young professionals want the best: the best job, the best BMW, the best baby,” writes James Traub. “They know they have to compete for it” (“Goodbye, Dr. Spock,” p. 61).
    48. Deutsch, “Education and Distributive Justice,” p. 394. He continues: “If educational measurement is not mainly in the form of a contest, why are students