Was It Survival of the Fittest… or the Kindest?
How kindness scaled?
You remember Darwin from school? Survival of the fittest. Only the strong survive. Nature is brutal. Life is a race.
Looks like we’ve been told the wrong story.
Survival of the Fittest?
For most of history, humans were vulnerable. No sharp claws. No fur to protect from the cold and slower than most predators. By any individual measure, early humans should have been easy prey. And then there was competition.
100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens wasn’t the only human species on Earth. We shared the planet with Neanderthals, Denisovans, and others. Neanderthals had bigger bodies and were possibly better than us in narrow tasks like toolmaking. They were well-adapted to harsh climates and had built rituals of their own.
So why did they disappear, while we didn’t? We survived because we helped each other.
We could:
Work in larger groups.
Share knowledge between tribes.
Create networks of trust with strangers.
Tell stories, form rituals, and build shared belief systems.
As author Yuval Noah Harari suggests, it was gossip, not muscle, that kept sapiens alive. We weren’t the fiercest, but we were cooperative. We helped more, connected better and passed on wisdom faster.
Kindness scaled. And we survived.
Kindness Isn’t a Soft Skill: It’s a Survival Trait
A book that I keep going back to in my quest to unpack kindness is Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. The book challenges the long-held view that humans are fundamentally selfish and argues that what really set our species apart wasn’t greed or aggression but our capacity for trust and empathy.
We tell our kids to be kind. But science tells us they already are; it’s been built into the DNA of our children over thousands of years.
When our kids are kind, they are carrying forward the same instinct that helped our ancestors survive in dangerous, uncertain times. These small, instinctive acts of care, comforting, helping and sharing by our kids were what allowed early humans to thrive in small, tightly knit groups.
Kindness wasn’t a luxury. It was the glue that held us together.
Then Something Remarkable Happened
And then kindness began to scale for us Homo sapiens. It evolved from face-to-face helping into the foundation of something far bigger- it morphed into cooperation.
What started as small, instinctive acts between a few individuals became the bedrock of how humans organised themselves. We began to cooperate not just with family or tribe but with strangers across time and geography.
This cooperation allowed trust to travel, stories to bind, and groups to build things larger than themselves. This cooperation helped kindness scale and allowed humans to build families, villages, moral codes, and entire civilisations.
In the next issue, we’ll explore how kindness moved from the personal to the collective and how we can raise kids who don’t just help but also build, lead, and collaborate to shape the world around them.
Till then, remember:
Raising kind isn’t always easy. But it’s always worth it.
Gaurav G