Driven: How Human Nature Shapes our Choices

FOREWORD

Driven offers a partial resolution between two conflicting trends in Western culture. The first trend is the close meshing of basic and applied science. Scientific discovery is enhanced when it yields practical results: science, like art, depends on patronage. The second tendency, opposed to the first, is the uneasiness felt when biology is brought close to accounts of the human condition, and especially when it promises real-world applications. In this pathbreaking book, Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria show one way to relax the tension. The deep study of human nature, they argue, does not justify Social Darwinism and gladiatorial commercial combat of the kind often portrayed in popular media. On the contrary, it offers formulas for ...