Word: darwinian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...piece of dogma. Although no sane person would deny that we humans harbor some pretty horrible tendencies and that these have some genetic basis, it does not follow that we are biologically driven to commit the seven deadly sins or that when moved by compassion, "we are in some Darwinian sense 'misusing' our equipment of reciprocal altruism ... into (unconsciously) thinking that the victims of famine are right next door and might someday reciprocate." I believe that there is such a thing as human character for which we, by our choices, are at least partially responsible. Wright could never prove...
...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...
...grimness of this new Darwinian worldview has been stressed by the biologist George Williams, whose 1966 book Adaptation and Natural Selection laid its theoretical foundations. Rather like the World War II physicists who were horrified by the weapon they had invented, Williams blanches at the view of human nature and of natural selection that he helped usher in. "Mother Nature," he says, "is a wicked old witch...
...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 altruism; the equipment is being "fooled" by electronic technology into (unconsciously) thinking that the victims of famine are right next door and might someday reciprocate. But that doesn't diminish the act. Our capacity to thus distort biological purpose, to prevail over our selfish...
...this dark, Darwinian view of nature has its saving grace. True, it doesn't let us imagine some idyllic time when nature was benign and the human heart pristine--a time when, as Augustine believed, human flesh had not yet been corrupted by raw desire and self-absorption. On the contrary, our distant evolutionary past was a time when desire was even rawer than now, and self-absorption less nuanced...