Though India got knocked out of the World Cup, it can still boast of being the inventor of IPL. In many ways, the IPL is the reverse image of the World Cup. While the World Cup is all about nationalism, the IPL is about internationalism.

Along with the Internet and other transnational inventions, IPL, which puts club above country, could represent yet another step taken towards the eventual emergence of a borderless world. In that sense, IPL is a product, and also a facilitator, of what American science writer Michael Shermer calls 'evonomics': a synthesis of Darwinian evolution and free-market economics as outlined by Adam Smith.

Darwin's theory of natural selection sought to replace the top-down idea of a divine creator, or God - through whose 'intelligent design' (a concept greatly in vogue even today in the US and other parts of the Christian world) all created things were formed - by a bottom-up approach which proposed that species evolve through successful adaptation to the environment. In other words, it's not God but genetic competition ('good' genes survive, at the expense of 'bad' genes) which makes us what we are. Read more...

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