How we came to be "good"

Humans have always been wondering what we're doing here in life and how we came to be, how the world came to be. Although there doesn't seem to be any consensus about that with regard to humans yet, evolutionary biologists seem to have already found the main answers to this question for the rest of the living world, with the exception of humans. Yet, humans are a part of that world and evolved from it, so they cannot really be an exception from it. With my exams coming close, I've lately been thrown in the world of Evolution and its philosophy of how everything came to be. It's quite interesting, actually. But overall, as my mom commented, I'm just learning about sex.

Biology says that the organism that passes the most genes to its offspring through reproduction is the fittest one and will be selected by natural selection. That organism would be expected to be the best competitor that would be able to get the most resources and mates for himself. The character of any organism should therefore be selfish – always just trying to maximise its own fitness in any way possible. However, even in nature, animals often live in groups and help each other. Evolutionary biologists, Hamilton most famous amongst those, explain this by saying that organisms receive direct or indirect benefits from doing good to others – if they help their siblings, they, due to relatedness, share the same genes, which will pass to the next generation through them. Or, in cases when they’re not related, the cost of helping is smaller than the benefit they might receive from that later. In this way, the nature is shown to be selfish, only really taking care of itself even when it seems as if it cared for someone else.

We humans evolved like any other creature, therefore the same principles of selfishness should apply to us as well. However, with the exception of eusocial animals such as ants and bees, we are among the most altruistic animals of the world. Everyone helps each other, even complete strangers where no benefit whatsoever can be received. Children are brought up being told to share their toys, help others, be kind and nice, in adulthood many people work as volunteers and help just simply because they want to help. It makes us feel good. This seems to contradict the evolutionary theory of how we came to be completely. How did such behaviour ever evolve? It comes from very deep within us, from our moral values and standards, which are in a way irrational – we know they are right without any rational reason. They are also present in all the world’s major religions. They seem to be almost like instincts, something that we cannot affect, provided we’ve grown up in a relatively normal environment and have no mental disorders.

The current world seems to on one hand support help and cooperation by working on common projects, but at the same time there is competitiveness everywhere. Also, help and working together are not the same as altruism as I already argued before – there can be plenty of selfish reasons to work together with someone. Especially young people my age have to compete so much to find their space under the sun, to get an education we want, to get a job we want, to get a decent place to live. Is this competitiveness really in nature? Evolution says definitely yes. But if we look at the world around us and our history, doesn’t’ competition mostly bring just misery? It brings a lot of stress and worry, failures, hard work, loneliness as no one is really by your side, truly supporting you. What about for the development of the world? Haven’t so many wars been started because of nations competing for more and more land and other resources? Of course it is not always possible to avoid competition – after all, the world is limited and everyone is still selfish enough somewhere to want to provide for themselves and have a decent life, and as resources are limited, people compete.

However, there is seven billion of us currently inhabiting this planet. Ten thousand years ago, there is no way so many people could survive. So how did we manage to grow so much? With development, of course, and the help of many new technologies. These were developed with the cooperation and mutual help to each other, a single person could never come up with all of that, even if they were the smartest human to have ever inhabited the Earth. Thus, by helping each other we can perhaps side-step the competition for resources. Nevertheless, we still only have one planet, so even in this way our population will not be able to infinitely grow.

So why are we so altruistic and in that so different from the majority of other organisms on the other planet? I can’t really give an answer to that, but I guess it’s exactly the aforementioned benefits of helping each other that made groups of more altruistic people more successful and their members more likely to survive, no matter whether they were related or not. In any case it is our evolutionary heritage, which made us as successful as a species as we now are. Let’s not throw it away – let’s be each other’s best friends and helpers, not the worst competitors.