Word: darwin
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...story of creation, the Book of Genesis long, long ago crumbled under the weight of science, notably Darwin's theory of natural selection. But Genesis isn't just about the beginning of the human race. It is also about the beginning of evil--about how and why sin and suffering entered human experience and stayed there. And here the verdict of science is more ambiguous. In some ways, the Bible's account of evil actually draws strength from the very Darwinism that undermined its account of history...
...biological roots of sin are not by themselves a news flash from the frontiers of science. More than a century ago, Thomas Huxley, Darwin's popularizer, lamented the fact that evolution has given all children "the instinct of unlimited self-assertion"--"their dose of original sin." But the past few decades have brought a deeper Darwinian understanding of human nature, and some of its pioneers believe Huxley underestimated our badness...
...first the good news. Evolutionary psychologists say our "moral sentiments" do, as Darwin speculated, have an innate basis. Such impulses as compassion, empathy, generosity, gratitude and remorse are genetically based. Strange as it may sound, these impulses, with their checks on raw selfishness, helped our ancestors survive and pass their genes to future generations...
...news. Contrary to a misconception that flourished in Darwin's day, these impulses did not give this boost to genetic proliferation mainly by furthering the overall "welfare of society"--and certainly not by furthering the "welfare of the species." As a result, humans don't naturally deploy our "moral" impulses diffusely--showering love and compassion on any needy Homo sapiens in the vicinity. We tend to reserve major doses of kindness either for close kin (the result of an evolutionary dynamic known as "kin selection") or for non-kin who show signs of someday returning the favor (a result...
Certainly, as even Williams stresses, our moral sentiments have lots of upside, including a heartening plasticity. They can be deployed less self-servingly than they were "designed" to be deployed. Darwin himself often felt pangs of concern about the plight of slaves, even though there were none in England to reciprocate his empathy. And consider the flush of compassion we feel upon witnessing, via TV, famine that is a hemisphere away. When moved by such images to donate money or canned goods--the rough opposite of greed and gluttony--we are in some Darwinian sense "misusing" our equipment of reciprocal...