another furious debate is about the seeming anti-darwinism of altruism. i stick by my purely darwinist explanation of it, but i sometimes like to think there's a supra-genetic imperative that has guided the development of our behavior.
the basic concept is that you work to see your dna go on another generation, so that it can go again, etc. (why should that even be? no real reason. it's just that the ones that didn't think that way died.) but i think that people also have a deep imperative to preserve HUMAN dna.
in fact, i wonder how much of evolution can be re-stated as pursuing the propagation of human dna itself, yours or someone else's. each one of us is really a collection of cells and microbes working in cooperation to keep our own "condo" up and running. what's so weird about thinking that humans actually feel like a mound of cells of one body? it's not a new idea, that we're all "one", but it's unusual to consider it not in a functional or spiritual sense, but in a literal sense.
and it explains a lot of behavior. altruism is not indirect survival, it is direct survival. when thousands of people are killed in a tsunami or earthquake miles away, it kind of bothers us.
do a thought experiment: imagine we've come down to a time where there's only ten people left on earth. won't you feel just that much more dedicated to making sure someone survives?
i think the darwin explanation should be amended to say, "i will do what it takes to make sure human dna survives, preferably my own."
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It's worth noting that we share, like, 98% of our DNA with monkeys. 97% or something with every other mammal and, maybe, 94% with vertebrates.
Maybe all forms of reverence for life come down to Dawkin's Selfish Gene. I've always thought that it makes better sense that way.
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