'Darwin 200' at the Business School welcomes Paul Seabright on collaboration after The Origin

As part of ‘Darwin 200’ celebration of Darwin’s birthday, Professor Paul Seabright of the University of Toulouse, will be speaking at the Business School on 5 March at 18.00.

Professor Seabright has spent much of his time thinking about the life and behaviour of animals. He has taken Darwin's natural selection and adaptation approach into the field of economics. He is interested in the adapted behaviours which allowed Homo sapiens to thrive in conditions of economic and genetic scarcity. These conditions characterised the savannah of pre-historic Africa where small kin groups are believed to have hunted and gathered with increasing levels of sophistication and collaboration.

The adaptations that made this social interaction work eventually spread to incorporate people outside of the family allowing larger groups to form. One example is the ability to treat strangers as though they were family members, so building trusting relationships with those who previously may have been met with aggression.

Attempting to these novel relations with strangers was a dangerous activity that may have failed many times resulting in injury or death. "The first itinerant traders of prehistory may have lacked the panache of great warriors," Seabright has said "but they were among the true heroes of our civilisation."

The promise of economic collaboration offered shared risk between groups when the climate, crop or disease tipped the precarious balance of survival against a specific group. Survival rates and reproduction or ‘fitness' in evolutionary terms, may have improved amongst those able to interact with strangers. In turn this may have resulted in more complex innovations like agriculture and, in time specialisation within the group to skilled tasks like tool manufacture.

Through this Darwinian analysis of the emergence of early economies, Seabright provides a framework which describes the earliest exchange economies. It may also provide an insight into the contemporary actions of those on Wall Street, described by Seabright as "the biggest and strangest zoo of all."

"Darwin's work after The Origin addressed the idea of competition and cooperation," said Seabright, "He did not reduce this behaviour to ubiquitous, fierce competition and did not see cooperation as an aberration." Seabright's lecture views humans as remarkably well-adapted apes. We are adapted to cooperate within groups to achieve shared goals whilst also competing to join powerful groups.

"As group living primates, they are intensely competitive, alert to the narcissism of tiny differences in status, navigating their social life through coalition formation," Seabright said. "The way to get ahead is to join powerful groups. The key to social life is not unfettered competition, nor universal cooperation, but a subtle mix of the two: competing fiercely to join up with the most attractive cooperators."

The work encourages economists and business scholars to step back and consider the fragility of economic cooperation and interaction. This appears to be a delicate state of affairs that, with modern levels of global interdependence and complex relations, is essentially one carried out in the company of strangers.

Biography
Paul Seabright was previously a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and Churchill College, Cambridge. He is currently a researcher at Université des Sciences Sociales, Toulouse. His book The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life (Princeton University Press 2004) was shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize.