Altruism and the limits of Darwinism

I am very fond of my neurologist friend for a number of reasons. For one thing, he is Hungarian, and therefore possessed of a unique and fascinating language as well as a devil-may-care attitude and certain weakness for hard liquor that I find so refreshing having lived among Germans now for 6 years. But I think the true source of my tender feelings for him stem from the very childlike attachment he has to people. Quite simply, it seems physically to pain him to be alone. Many's the time he has phoned me during those occasions when his girlfriend - also a doctor - has been on duty to beg for someone to accompany him while he undertakes such homely little projects as stew-making, pickling or preserving.

But despite all his homely qualities, my friend is most definitely a neurologist at heart, and tends to over-emphasise the biological or materialist influences upon human life during our regular philosophical discussions. Such was the case last week when we met for Jenga and mulled wine in a bar up in the old town. I had just talked over with him my reasons for wanting to leave the town and so had begun a general discussion on what the purpose of a life ought to be. Predictably, he answered as a life-scientist and spoke of life's purpose purely in terms of the imperative to pass on your genes and ensure the survival of your offspring.

Now it's not that I do not agree with him. In fact, I remember holding and propounding similar views myself when I first met my ex-wife back in 2002. Also, my thesis is written in the field of Inter-disciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies, and specifically the exchange of ideas between literature, theology and evolutionary biology in the post-Darwinian period. In short, not only do I know a thing or two about the evolutionary argument, I also find it very convincing... up to a point; for in my opinion, what makes humans unique in comparison to other species is the way in which we often disregard the so-called biological imperative to selfishly pass on our own genes and are motivated instead to sacrifice our own advantages and, at times, our life for others.

Now you could argue, as my neurologist friend did in fact, that we are not unique among species in our sometime tendency for self-sacrifice. True, individuals of many species use alarm calls which, in alerting other members of their species to the presence of danger, also make it much more likely that they themselves will become the quarry. But a moment’s reflection will surely impress upon you the chasm of difference between the mechanistic chirping of a marmot at the shadow of an eagle and the intrinsic motivation, year after year, to care for the sick and the elderly as so many unsung heroes and heroines in our communities currently do. Indeed, it is a testament to how complex and rationalised the motivations of such individuals are that they often spring from a system of values which for some even goes by the name of religion.

Of course, you could view the emphasis which many of the world’s religions place upon charity as itself the product of evolution, an extra-corporeal tool which serves to increase our ability to survive as a race as much perhaps as evolved immunity to some diseases. But it is important to understand that if we do go down this path of reasoning, we are merely creating the illusion of understanding charitable behaviour by appending the label ‘evolution’ to a set of processes so complex that we haven’t even begun to truly understand them.

This was how I argued with my dear friend, as his sleepy girlfriend yawned on his shoulder. “I’m almost finished honey.”, I reassured her with a smile, “Then you can go home.”. So my conclusion in a nutshell was and is this: that if you want to look for the identity of an individual, that essential part of themselves which can be ascribed to their own will and character rather than the selfish urges and drives of their race, that part of themselves which has risen above the eternally looping hum and chatter of their biology to contribute something which has real meaning, then look for what they have done for others. At the end of any human life our saving grace should be that underneath all that vanity and selfishness, there is enough love to matter.