Law of the Jungle
by Eric Jackson
On Christmas morning, which I spent at my sister's house, I woke
up, pulled on some clothes, and went into the living room. "Stand still," my brother said.
Which I did. He quickly brushed a scorpion off the back side of
my pants.
And there you have it, the Law of the Jungle. People who help one another have the advantage over tribes of
extreme individualists.
The Social Darwinists' "survival of the fittest" among "rugged individuals" was somewhere along the line grafted onto the concept of the
way that jungles are supposed to work, but it ain't necessarily
so. ???
Biologists at Barro Colorado Island and other tropical forest
research sites have proven and are continuing to demonstrate in
new ways that the Law of the Jungle is both competition and cooperation, a reality that includes
symbiosis as well as parasitism, with much more social organization
than has traditionally been acknowledged in popular culture.
It wouldn't be such a horrible thing to go back to the Law of the Jungle, were it the real one and not an ideological parody. Let us all
brush the scorpions off of one another's pants, and help those
around us in these difficult economic times. It's the evolutionarily
advanced thing to do.
