Comment: Evolution – get the right attitude
These are not true…
• A nasty, vicious lion stalks, attacks and murders a poor defenceless antelope on an ‘Animal Planet’ documentary.
• My cat loves me. He knows when I’m upset and will deliberately comfort me.
• Selfish genes behave immorally.
• The Earth is a living thing just like us.
Empathy is one of the great strengths to have evolved in humans. Our ability to see from someone else’s point of view forms the basis of social and moral behaviour. Wonderfully, this is all done subconsciously. Subsequent moral discussions are mostly rationalisations justifying these intuitive responses. (Steven Pinker http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html)
But here’s the rub. We apply this empathy to other things – living and non-living – in unhelpful ways. People believe they can see the world as a non-human would. Recently, a friend told me that he could genuinely imagine the world as seen by a bat. This belief has benefits, of course. We are more likely to respect other living and non-living things (Gaia, for example), if we see them as “like us”. Unfortunately, however, we also can moralise about animal behaviour, seeking to punish as if animals are free moral agents with responsibility. Again, all is done subconsciously. So, lions are not nasty; cute looking dears are not innocent; cats don’t love; genes are not morally selfish and Earth is not alive like us. As an aside, biologists, like Richard Dawkins, often refer to observed behaviour metaphorically. So behaviour can be described a selfish or altruistic without any moral implications.
The bottom line is we should be aware that living things (and non-living for that matter) have no natural or moral purposes. They just evolved to what they are today and will continue to do so. Evolutionary processes are blind and uncaring and putting chance aside, they reward (non-morally) characteristics leading to successful reproduction and punish (again, non-morally) those that don’t. As suggested in Pinker’s article, even our moral attitudes can be seen to have developed in a similar way.
Don’t get me wrong. We shouldn’t use this awareness as an excuse to ignore the problems we create for all livings things and for the planet. Our capacity to see and remedy problems beyond conflicting immediate needs may be our true greatness.
© 2008 Alex McCullie
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