May 5, 2011
religion dispatches
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/science/3747/were_you_born_selfish%3A_an_interview_with_frans_de_waalRichard Dawkins has declared that humans are “nicer than is good for our selfish genes.” Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal argues against this popular picture of evolution as a Hobbesian wilderness of selfishly competing individuals, where life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” De Waal focuses his research on the social behavior of primates, studying questions of culture, altruism, morality, and empathy.
Citing social animal behavior, de Waal posits that justice, morality, altruism, empathy—noble notions we tend to think of as being particularly human, and therefore antithetical to "animal nature"—are not "unnatural," but rather are deeply rooted in our primate past; that the good in us is as instinctive a part of our biology as the bad. ...
Alex's comment: We have a selfish instinct for survival of the individual. We have a social instinct for survival of the group, even the species as a whole. Survival of the species also depends on natural selection of the fittest members, which operates on competition (eg for food and for mating), which in turn needs the selfish instinct again. The two (selfish and social) instincts are not mutually exclusive. They just operate in parallel. The ultimate aim is the same---survival. At any rate, Naturalism explains well. Richard Dawkins tells us how selfishness is instinctive and naturalistic. De Waal tells us how human virtues are instinctive and naturalistic. They are in agreement with each other, in fact. They both agree that
we are just animals and that
human (im)morality are just evolved naturalistic animal instincts.
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