Whenever a natural disaster hits, like last week’s Hurricane
Sandy, reporters love to find heart-warming stories of people helping strangers
to balance out the heartbreak of loss. The reporters always speak as if this is
an unusual form of human behavior brought out by special circumstances; the
unspoken assumption is that ordinary human behavior is completely selfish.
For centuries now Western societies have believed that
humans were basically evil: first the Christian dogma of original sin held
sway, and for the last few hundred years philosophers and biologists have
argued that the natural order, humans included, is all selfish competition: Nature
is “red in tooth and claw” (from an Alfred, Lord Tennyson poem).
This gloomy appraisal of nature is now being upended by
scientists across a number of specialties. Biologists are discovering that cooperation
and symbiotic relationships are common features of the natural order (watch
an interview I did with a biologist discovering a symbiotic relationship
between spiders and carnivorous pitcher plants).
E. O. Wilson’s new book, The
Social Conquest of Earth, presents the idea that the reason humans have
become the dominant animal on the planet is because we learned to cooperate.
Dr. Wilson is a specialist in ants, and he argues that the
creatures who have learned to form cooperative societies are the masters of
their ecological niche: “The twenty thousand known species of eusocial insects,
mostly ants, bees, wasps, and termites, account for only 2 percent of the
approximately one million known species of insects. Yet this tiny minority of
species dominate the rest of the insects in their numbers, their weight, and
their impact on the environment. As humans are to vertebrate animals, the
eusocial insects are to the far vaster world of invertebrate animals. Among
creatures larger than microorganisms and roundworms, eusocial insects are the
little things that run the terrestrial world.”
At some point in the evolution of human beings, after we
split off from chimpanzees, hominids started cooperating, as I wrote in an earlier
post. Unlike ants, humans are not genetically identical within a colony.
This means we have two opposing tendencies in our nature: selfish competition
to ensure our genes survive combined with altruistic cooperation to ensure our
group survives. The tension between these two tendencies creates what we call
“human nature.” Dr. Wilson writes, “Individual selection is responsible for
much of what we call sin, while group selection is responsible for the greater
part of virtue. Together they have created the conflict between the poorer and
better angels of our nature.” But this conflict is what has made us so
successful in our evolution.
Dr. Wilson cites research
by Michael Tomasello (Max
Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) that points out “that the
primary difference between human cognition and that of other animal species,
including our closest genetic relatives, the chimpanzees, is the ability to
collaborate for the purpose of achieving shared goals and intentions. The human
specialty is intentionality, fashioned from an extremely large working memory.”
We not only express our own intentions, we can read other’s intentions
relatively easily. “From infancy we are predisposed to read the intention of
others, and quick to cooperate if there is even a trace of shared interest. In
one revealing experiment, children were shown how to open the door to a
container. When adults tried to open the door but pretended not to know how,
the children stopped what they were doing and crossed the room to help.
Chimpanzees put in the same circumstance, but far less advanced in cooperative
awareness, made no such effort.”
Dr. Tomasello concludes in this
essay on his book Why We Cooperate,
“It seems that Rousseau, not Hobbes, was right in the first place: humans are
born helpful, or at least they become so very early in development before much
active socialization and teaching has taken place.”
American culture is built on the idea of the self-sufficient
individual—the pioneer family making it on their own, the cowboy riding the
range alone. What would our culture look like if we celebrated our cooperative
nature as much as our competitive nature? I found an essay online that spoke very well
to this idea:
We don't talk about a desire to do
a thing well for its own sake. We don't talk about the incentives of
achievement. For example, would a manufacturer work to make a better
product if there were public awards for such craftsmanship? Would there
be an incentive if the competition were non-destructive. . . if the goal were
to make the best and be recognized rather than to make the better and kill the
competitor's business? We don't talk about how well the public can be
served by unified objectives, where all work toward a common goal and divide
labor in a sane manner. Within companies, teams are brought together with
planning to get to a single goal, and this works very well. Why can't
this happen between businesses? It worked well for the Apollo
project.
Humans learned to overcome the deeply embedded instinct of
selfishness over a hundred thousand years ago. I think we are up to the
challenge of changing our culture today.
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