What do honeybees and startup companies have in common?
Biologist Edward O. Wilson has spent a lifetime observing ants, bees, and other social critters, and how they function together in groups. In contrast, my own profession—as a practicing venture capitalist—seems to be worlds away. Surprisingly, I have found that the ideas of Wilson, my former college professor, are profoundly more relevant to my work than those of traditional fields like economics or business.
On the surface, biology and technological innovation seem distinctly different. But if we adjust our perspective slightly, it’s remarkable how useful Wilson’s ideas are to understanding Silicon Valley and America’s startup economy.
E.O. Wilson needs little introduction. A legendary professor at Harvard, he is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and considered by many to be the second most important biologist in history, after Charles Darwin. His new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, is considered his “magnum opus.”
In my work, people often describe communities like Silicon Valley by using the label “innovation ecosystems.” But they only do so metaphorically. Can the ideas of E.O. Wilson inspire us to push beyond mere metaphor? What happens when we think of highly innovative human networks as real biological systems? Human beings, after all, are animals, too. Shouldn’t human society count as a form of biological system?
Our recent book, The Rainforest, attempts this improbable fusion of ideas. If we view communities like Silicon Valley through a sociobiological lens, we discover an entirely new way to view human economic phenomena. The term “rainforest” then becomes more than an analogy: innovation ecosystems actually behave like real biological systems in many ways.
So, let’s apply biology to tackle one of the world’s great challenges: why do certain communities like Silicon Valley generate such extraordinary and sustainable innovation and economic output, while the vast majority of places—even those with large helpings of smart people, clever ideas, and capital resources—fail to do so? To answer this, it helps to examine human nature.
This notion seems simple enough. In practice, however, we don’t usually think that way. The study of neoclassical economics has primarily drawn from cold-blooded concepts in fields like theoretical philosophy and Newtonian thermodynamics. The traditional MBA curriculum teaches students to aspire for numerical precision, as a way to overcome the randomness of human foibles.
In his new book, Wilson reverses decades of conventional thinking on evolutionary biology and human nature. Citing evidence that stretches across mathematics, neuroscience, anthropology, and other disciplines, he contends that while selfish individuals tend to win against other individuals, groups of altruists tend to win against other groups. It is this evolutionary tension—between individual needs and group interests—that explains why only a few species of animals, including bees, wasps, ants, termites, and human beings, have developed complex social instincts enabling them to take over much of the planet.
But how is Wilson’s lens useful in understanding Silicon Valley, not to mention the entire American startup economy? Does the connection between micro (single animal behavior) and macro (animal group behavior) in biology help bridge the gap in our understanding between, say, microeconomics and macroeconomics in human social systems? The emerging answer appears to be yes: the evolutionary tension between individual and tribe—and its implications—is a powerful puzzle piece for creating a new economic paradigm.