New research shows there is a biological basis for co-operative and empathetic behaviour.
Read it at Al Jazeera
Biological research is increasingly debunking the view of humanity as competitive, aggressive and brutish.
"Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies," Frans de Waal, a biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Monday.
New research on higher animals from primates and elephants to mice shows there is a biological basis for behavior such as co-operation, said de Waal, author of The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society.
Until just 12 years ago, the common view among scientists was that humans were "nasty" at the core but had developed a veneer of morality - albeit a thin one, de Waal told scientists and journalists from some 50 countries at the conference in Vancouver, Canada.
But human children - and most higher animals - are "moral" in a scientific sense, because they need to co-operate with each other to reproduce and pass on their genes, he said.Research has disproved the view, dominant since the 19th century, typical of biologist Thomas Henry Huxley's argument that morality is absent in nature and something created by humans, said de Waal.
And common assumptions that the harsh view was promoted by Charles Darwin, the so-called father of evolution, are also wrong, he said.Mainstream economics is based on game theory, and game theory presupposes that humans are individualistic and driven by self-interest, so that they are naturally competitive rather than naturally cooperative.
Ayn Rand's Objectivism takes this to its logical conclusion, in which the ideal individual is one having no social (altruistic) tendencies. Rand, following Nietzsche, attributes altruism to nurture instead of nature, viewing it as a consequence of deficient culture, largely owing to religious ideology. Interestingly, Rand says she is an Aristotelian, but Aristotle considered the human being (anthropos) to be a social animal (Politics 1.2), and the state (polis) to be the highest from of community.
Rand's view is that of ontological individualism, a curious view of human nature in the history of thought. It is the basis of extreme methodological individualism assumed by a rational representative agent motivated by exclusive pursuit of maximum utility.
In contrast, biologist and MMTer Roger Erickson continually emphasizes the importance of increasing the rate of adaptability through coordination and exploration of options as the scientifically substantiated method of meeting challenges.
7 comments:
I think they should be a space between your < and (
Damo
Interesting post,
Objectivism is a failed ideology (philosophy?) for which most foundational assumptions are simply wrong. Even if one did follow it to the last consequences, logic does not follow the results would be what Ayn Rand implied in the economic aspect.
But ignoring all this, and going back to foundational axioms, no organism has ever evolved or survived which was not been selfish, the simply reason of survival is at the expense of other organisms in a limited energy ecosystem.
However evolution has created a variety of adaptive strategies, amongst them are such things as some sort of 'natural morality', empathy, cooperation, positive emotions etc.
It's really clueless to say that when someone is being altruistic, for example, is not selfish, ultimately every organism does act in its own interests, but this does not mean one has to act unnaturally as a cool-blooded machine for the sake of it.
This is an excerpt from a book where the author was analyzing the Book of Daniel, this is a view from "my side of the tracks" so to speak, somewhat congruent with what Tom has posted here, this view is outside of Christian Orthodoxy:
"Evil Comes from Without
The advent and presence of these four spirits on the earth, and specially the descent of the dragon before the highest pinnacle of human rebellion is reached, throw a lurid light upon the nature of mankind. Why was it necessary that these foreign elements be introduced in order to influence and force men to rise against their Maker? Why was there a serpent in the garden? Could not Adam and Eve have found a spring of sin and evil within? Why will Satan be loosed at the close of the thousand years? Will there not be enough of opposition to God in the hearts of men to organize a rebellion of themselves? Always, at every crucial crisis in human history, man has not been left to follow his own instinct or nature, but has been influenced or coerced from without. This should be sufficient to throw serious doubts upon the theological theory of the absolute sinfulness of man's nature. God does not use it to turn man against his Maker. Mortality is the cause of sin. Romans 5:12 reads "death passed through into all mankind, on which all sinned."
Let us not confuse man's nature with his mortality, his dying condition, which causes him to sin."
Me here: Mankind is the only part of His creation that knows it is constantly dying. No other form of His creation has to deal with this.
"For the ration of sin is death" Romans 6:23; sin is provisioned by death.
Resp,
This insinuation that methodological individualism implies obsessive selfishness and/or individual isolation is not only wrong, but, like most everything MMT, just plain dumb. An absence of SWAT teams does not preclude normal human cooperation and respect.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard168.html#1
Ok, so if people are naturally nice, what does this say about the prisoner's dilemma?
Tschäff, the claim isn't that game theory doesn't have an actual basis is human relationships, or that competition is not significant in biology, but that the presumption of self-interest independent of social relations is insufficient as a chief assumption on which to build models involving human action, like economics — which is essentially what max u and a single representative agent does.
The result is models that don't model reality. As Noah Smith points out, "conservative policy recommendations don't emerge because they come from the best models, but only because they come from the easiest models." It is a whole lot simpler to model simplistic behavior than the complexity of human behavior in contemporary society. In fact, none of the social science have yet managed to accomplish this very satisfactorily. The upshot is that economists are prone to overstating the relevance of conclusions drawn from their models.
@ Bob Roddis,
No insinuation intended. As I have said many times, I am a libertarian of the left, specifically anarcho-communitarian. I am as distrustful of authoritarian government as I am of centralized economic and political control in the hands of a privileged class, whether it be by strength, land ownership, wealth, or social position.
I believe that methodological individualism is misplaced as an assumption on which to build macroeconomics, e.g., due to fallacies of composition that result. A course of action that is beneficial for an individual may turn out to not be beneficial if many others choose the same course of action. For example, the paradox of thrift and the free rider problem are examples of this. Macro models based on the assumption that macro must be grounded on microfoundation instead of recognizing that macro is a separate field with its own dynamic result in models that fail as policy prescriptions for this reason.
Macro needs to be based on methodological holism, which views society as a social system in which the elements (individuals) are organized in a complex web of relationships based on institutional arrangements, formal and informal. Methodological holism is necessary to model complex biological and social systems. This has long been recognized in science, and it is the basis of general system theory.
This is different from methodological collectivism which views humans as naturally hive animals, where the relationships among individuals are given and supersede individual choice. Generally, this presumes an authoritarian hierarchical structure with some a priori justification like the divine right of monarchs or mandate of heaven. Others see it as the natural outcome of extreme Darwinianism's survival of the fittest that results in the supposed "natural" rule of those that are able to attain power for as long as they can maintain it.
Methodological holism is fully compatible with libertarianism of the left, in that it recognizes that some form of social relationships and institutional arrangements are needed as organizing principles, these are subject to human choice, implicitly or explicitly, hence are also subject to change. In free societies, humans decide collectively what type of society they desire to create through a political process.
Libertarians of the left hold (as a value judgement) that the optimal political process is participatory democracy, with each person having an equal say in the process. Anarchists of the left prefer using consensus insofar as possible as the preferred method of social and political choice, obviating the need for government separate from the governed.
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