One of the biggest stumbling blocks to a purely Darwinian explanation of the world is the persistence of traits and behaviors that, strictly speaking, don’t further the purposes of what Richard Dawkins famously called “the selfish gene.”
The most obvious stumbling blocks are human altruism and cooperation. If natural selection is a “zero sum game,” that is, if your selfish gene wins, then my selfish gene loses, why should I bother to cooperate with you?
Attempts to get around this problem have amounted to little more than “just so stories”: “unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative explanations,” often involving saber-tooth cats.
Here’s the latest case in point: a solution that invokes, of all things, belief in God, or at least a god.
A paper recently published in the journal Nature concludes that the behaviors such as treating other people with fairness and impartiality made possible the creation of “large-scale cooperative institutions, such as trade and markets.” The paper then goes on to say that these less-selfish behaviors were the result of “the fear that a punitive God is watching.”
Continue reading BreakPoint – Why Human Kindness Breaks Down the Theory of Evolution
