In this, the penultimate year before the big 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (and his 200th birthday to boot), I’ve been tucking in evolutionary concepts into a couple of the unoccupied nooks and crannies of my brain. I always feel underead, and in areas of science, the pangs of inadequacy are acute. So, especially in honor of the title of this blog, I wanted to bring up this quesion of why we humans generally get along with each other. Why do we forgo our own safety to help others, why cooperate, why be altruistic? We open our checkbooks with every hurricane, tornado and cyclone. The fact that other critters from bees to big cats also show cooperative behaviors makes the question more intriguing for people, because then it’s not a question of “just us.” (Humans. We’re so myopic. We think it’s all about us.)
Darwin, too, puzzled over this and how it fit with survival. And according to Science, scientists are still pondering it, looking at the idea of altruism and cooperative behavior from the perspectives of genetics, evolution, and even game theory.
Think about how many times in the course of a day you take into consideration the greater good or helping an individual. Hold open a door, work together to tackle a problem, give of your time, talents and energy. Otherwise, we’d never get anything done. We’d be rocking in a corner hugging our knees trying to figure out how to acquire our food or our shelter all on an individual basis.
I think that’s one of the reasons that I remain hopeful that the populace of the planet will eventually cooperate on some level to mitigate or halt the destruction we cause. It’ll all be for the greater good (and we’ll have no resources at all if we don’t). -jen
