Why Are We Like We Are?

I may spend a little too much time wondering about some pretty obtuse questions.  After watching what Hamas did in Israel, Russia in Ukraine, China to Uighurs, the ongoing slaughters in Africa;And my mind returned to a train of thought I have had for some time.  I think I know why humans here on Earth have the characteristics we have in regard to our fellow humans.  While we are capable of empathy, kindness, even sacrifice of self for others; we are also incredibly brutal to each other, wantonly slaughtering, raping and assaulting on the thinnest of pretexts.  We are essentially tribal; that is how we evolved.  Within the tribe, generally our best behavior will appear.  But toward the “other”– members of a different tribe, our behavior is often nothing less than horrifying.  And today, tribe can be defined along any number of dimensions–religion, politics, ethnicity.

Evolution works slowly.  Modern society which makes possible a high standard of living for many people is a very recent development even in the context of the million years of so of the current dominant human sub-species.  For almost all of the time since the most rudimentary humans arose, survival has been a matter of competing over scarce resources.  Water and easily obtainable food were in short supply.  Our very human-ness–a unique intelligence and consciousness–is an outgrowth of that competition.  Problem solvers had a very distinct advantage, and one solution to struggling for limited resources is simply to eliminate the competition.

Distinct groups or tribes of humans likely arose because as the original group became larger and resources within the feasible travel range became stretched, the group would split and a sub-group would move to a new territory.  This “solution” to the problem of finding adequate resources led to the relatively rapid spread of humans across not just Africa, but what is now Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas.  But these various sub-groups would inevitably abut each other’s territory and friction would arise over resource claims.  Growing numbers of people within a group and increasing numbers of groups exacerbated the potential conflict.  If we are honest, what better way to win the intensifying resource battle than killing the competition.  And since many forms of complex life on Earth, including humans, survive by eating other life forms, we probably had some genetic pre-disposition to killing in any event.

So I believe that early and ongoing human evolution favored those who were willing to without hesitation use violence against “outsiders”, i.e., those members of another tribe who were or even might be contesting for the same resources.  And, as I said, evolution is slow, so even though now with our advanced technologies we should be able to provide a good standard of living for all humans, and cooperate to reach that goal, instead we continue to behave as we are evolutionarily programmed–to lump people into tribes and be willing to behave atrociously toward those perceived to not be in our tribe.   If we survive long enough, maybe there will be some distinct evolutionary advantage of cooperation that overwhelms the competitive urge and genes.

But what I really have pondered is this: do all worlds in our universe have the same fate in regard to any complex life that might arise?  Is there no better world for life?  Is this dynamic of competition among and within life forms inevitable on any world?  Is that a fundamental precept of how evolution works–that competition drives selection of certain behaviors and encoding of those behaviors in genes, assuming that complex life anywhere must have some means of replicating and of adapting to changing environmental circumstances?  We might imagine a world with such a plethora of food and other resources that the competition dynamic does not arise to a significant extent.  But would such a world have a corresponding rise in the number of life forms and members in each life form?  Does the number and types of life forms bear some relationship to the level of resources on a world.  Could there be conscious life that does not need food or water or is based on chemicals that are so  abundantly present that conflict over resources doesn’t arise?  The pessimist would say the universe appears pretty uniform in the laws, including chemical elements, that make it up, so it would seem very likely that all worlds harboring life are similar.  The pessimist sees that on Earth up to current days, one group of humans being violent toward other groups of humans is often rewarded and rarely punished.

The optimist in me wants to hope that there are alternate approaches to the evolution and history of life; that there are gentler, kinder species of life elsewhere.  The optimist in me wants to believe that even on Earth, humans might persist long enough to evolve to a less violent species.  The realist says it looks unlikely right now.