'Homo sapiens'

'Survival of the fittest'* is often touted as justifying proof of the naturalness and inevitability of capitalism's machinations. But are no-holds-barred competition and 'enlightened self-interest' really as compatible as we would like to believe? Is either morally sound or even sane? Where is the better world we were promised would arrive if we would just follow our primordial instincts and accumulate for ourselves?

Lest we forget that Someone Else is the author of creation and its rules (and there is only so far we can bend things before something breaks . . .), I beg us to remember other laws of the jungle less economically stimulating but equally applicable:

1. Don't foul your watering hole.
2. Never expect your dinner to come to you.
3. Live within your means; you can't live without them.
4. There is no independence; everyone is contingent (and the higher up on the food chain you are the more true this is).
5. What constitutes competitive advantage is liable to change on occasion, sometimes gradually and sometimes abruptly.
6. If your habitat changes faster than you can and there's nowhere to migrate, guess what?

*The vital if fairly haphazard process of natural selection by which adaptive genes are passed on in greater proportion to the next generation within the population of a given species while maladaptive genes are edited out. Interpreted by some to mean that competition is the fundamental organizing principle of life.