From Richard Dawkins’ classic, The Selfish Gene.
Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.
I mentioned yesterday how it’s only in the past few hundred years that we’ve begun to escape the random walk through a minefield that is Darwinian evolution.
There’s soemthing funny about this, and almost self-defeating from the gene’s perspective. Our cells collectively chose to cooperate, in hopes of advancing their own survival, by creainge a larger organiasm that was instrumentally intelligent — capable of planning and reasoning insofar as doing so advanced its likliehood of reproducing, while minimizing the associated energy expenditure. We were constanly under selection pressure to be as stupid as we could get away with.
But something changed recently, perhaps related to spoken language, or to civilization and technology and the written word, and we found ourselves becoming much smarter much more quickly. We eventually gained the ability to look back at ourselves, and the process that created us, with total detachment.
Now, we have the ability to pick and choose the parts that still serve us and the parts that don’t. We’ve emerged from a fierce and deadly evolutionary environment, with hopes to create a bountiful and peaceful world. Doing so will mean sacrificing the parts of us — the selfish, cruel, and aggresive parts — that first allowed us to rise to this position.
Many of our genes will still survive, but no longer because they are ruthless — instead because the meta-structures they spawned, what we call people, grew our own beliefs, preferences, and hopes, and had the sheer intelligence (and power) to promote them on our own accord.