Nice People: Continue Being Nice
Know this for: if you’re caught between a nice boy/girl and a bad boy/girl, this may influence you
Pragya sent me this thought-provoking piece from David Brooks about the research being done on the evolutionary disadvantages of selfishness. Many people are now saying that humans have been able to become the way we are–cultured and such–because of our instinctual desire and need to cooperate. To quote one of the more interesting research results:
“An infant of 12 months will inform others about something by pointing. Chimpanzees and other apes do not helpfully inform each other about things. Infants share food readily with strangers. Chimpanzees rarely even offer food to their own offspring.”
If you have spent any time with toddlers, you also know that as we get older, we become even more helpful (though often for less innocent reasons). All of these findings are certainly optimistic–perhaps we humans are not as ruthlessly self-absorbed as we believe. History and sociology support these findings. After all, when has any major event or transformation been driven just by one person?
My one problem with the article itself is the conclusion Brooks comes to. He suggests that all of this research inevitably implies that if cooperation permeates our structure as humans, so does morality, which he connects to ethics and religion. The morality leap in itself is too much for me; the instinct to cooperate still comes from a basic need for the self to survive. This is not morality, but simply a desire to live. And religion? Seriously? Why do people still automatically connect religion with ethics or morality? That’s not to say that there aren’t morals or ethics within religion, but to unquestioningly suggest that religion as a general whole equates to ethics or morals is a stretch for me personally.
