New research shows there is a biological basis for co-operative and empathetic behaviour.
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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.
