World Views

Oasis changing lives through football.

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Oasis Founder Clifford Martinus has a contagious passion for sport and community. This is evident in the work done at Oasis Place with his belief that the connection to a team, fair play and sport can support an individual in overcoming the odds, both personal and social. This South African non-profit creates positive personal development opportunities for youth from marginalised backgrounds.

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Latest Posts in World Views

Interview with Rhonda Collard-Spratt and Jacki Ferro, Aboriginal Memoirists

Rhonda Collard-Spratt is a voice for the mission children of Australia’s Stolen Generations. Rhonda is an engaging performer, an Aboriginal dancer, singer-songwriter, poet, artist, and storyteller. She has worked in women’s prisons around suicide prevention, helping them reconnect with their Aboriginality. Jacki Ferro is a community development worker, writer and editor based in Brisbane. Since the 1990s, Jacki has run cross-cultural, unifying projects that promote self-determination, community education and social justice. As Community Relations Officer at Ipswich in 2000, Jacki instigated the Link Up! Multicultural Festival and the first Sorry Day March. Qualified in public relations, social planning, and writing, editing and publishing, in 2013 Jacki began co-writing and editing memoirs of inspirational, brave people.


The Evolution of “Zoon Politikon” (The Political Animal)

Aristotle, it seems, got it right.  Politics may have played a key role in human evolution as the classic primate pattern of male dominance hierarchies shifted to a pattern of consensual leadership for common goals and collective action.


Economic Markets Versus Basic Needs: A Biological Approach to the “Dismal Science”

Going forward, the “bioeconomy” must take precedence.  (An outline for achieving what might be called “the next major transition” in evolution is provided in my forthcoming 2018 book Synergistic Selection: How Cooperation has Shaped Evolution and the Rise of Humankind.)  To borrow a punch-line from the great twentieth century biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, “the future is not vouchsafed by any law of nature, but it may be striven for.”


The Fair Society: It’s Time to Re-write the Social Contract

Many Americans were outraged when the Wall Street banks paid out an estimated $18.4 billion in executive and staff bonuses in 2009, even while the economy was being cratered by the financial meltdown and the Great Recession.1  It seemed very unfair; the perpetrators were being rewarded while the victims were paying a terrible price.  


The Fairness Instinct and the Social Contract

 One of the important findings of the emerging, multi-disciplinary science of human nature is that humans do, indeed, have an innate sense of fairness.  We regularly display a concern for others’ interests as well as our own, and we even show a willingness to punish perceived acts of unfairness.