Recently, while working on The Spiritual Brain, I had a chance to study “altruism,†a technical term for the quality that causes people to prefer others’ welfare to their own, even if the others are unknown strangers.
Much social science literature on altruism is not worth reading because it proceeds from a fundamentally wrong assumption: Concern for others is basically fake. People pretend to be concerned for others in order to gain an advantage, so that they can survive and leave offspring.
That is the view of “evolutionary psychology.†Don’t confuse evolutionary psychology with evolutionary biology. The latter is a serious science field, currently under fire because of problems with its major theory, Darwinian evolution. How that will turn out, who knows? But evolutionary psychology is not really science at all, so far as I can see. It is a collection of fairy tales, attempting to ground all human behaviour in the ways that early humans allegedly survived hundreds of thousands of years ago. But our long-ago ancestors left no written records, so no one really knows how they survived.
A rock on which evolutionary psychology founders is the apparently uniquely human quality of self-sacrifice or altruism, on behalf of unknown strangers. As science writer Mark Buchanan asks in a recent article in New Scientist, “In evolutionary terms it is a puzzle because any organism that helps others at its own expense stands at an evolutionary disadvantage. So if many people really are true altruists, as it seems, why haven’t greedier, self-seeking competitors wiped them out?â€Â
Good question. On Tuesday, August 2, 2005, during a torrential downpour, an Air France airbus carrying 309 people overshot a runway at Pearson International Airport in Toronto and burst into flames. The governor-general of Canada issued her heartfelt condolences to the grieving survivors of the estimated 200 dead. In fact, as the rain and smoke subsided, it emerged that no one had died (though 43 people had suffered minor injuries). Why was that?
As it happens, the plane came to a halt near Highway 401, Ontario’s main artery. Canadian-born columnist Mark Steyn recounted in the British newspaper Telegraph that
Eyewitness accounts vary: some people are said to have panicked, others to have stayed calm. … passing motorists pulled off the road and hurried toward the burning jet to help any survivors. Of the eight emergency exits, two were deemed unsafe to use, and on a third and a fourth the slides didn’t work. None the less, in a chaotic situation, hundreds of strangers co-ordinated sufficiently to evacuate a small space through four exits in less than a couple of minutes before the Airbus was consumed by flames.
Many evacuated passengers were later picked up on the shoulder of the 401 and driven by strangers to Air France’s terminal.
So let’s see … passing strangers pulled off the road and ran toward the burning wreck, not away from it? Hundreds of unrelated people who would never see each other again cooperated to ensure that all got out in time? People offered rides to strangers from around the world, even though some of them might well have been terrorists who were responsible for the grounding of the plane?
Of course, one can always construct a plausible story set in prehistoric times to account for altruism as a self-seeking behavior. But surely it makes more sense to conclude that the Toronto strangers who took the risk of helping were not seeking any benefit, either for themselves or their descendants. In a recent edition of Scientific American Mind, psychologists Ernst Fehr and Suzanne Viola conclude, based on evidence such as this,
In an age of enlightenment and secularization, scientists such as Charles Darwin shocked contemporaries when they questioned the special status of human beings and attempted to classify them on a continuum with all other species. Humans were stripped of all that was godlike. Today biology is restoring to them something of that former exalted position. Our species is apparently the only one with genetic makeup that promotes selflessness and true altruistic behavior.
Christians, of course, accept that we can make genuine sacrifices to help others. Jesus assures us that “Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it.†(Luke 17:33, NIV) That is the true answer to Mark Buchanan’s question, even though it is a paradox. Indeed, from a Christian perspective, narrow self-interest is a shallow grave, and it is heartening to see how many of our fellow citizens have avoided falling into it.
This column first appeared in ChristianWeek, September 30, 2005.
Also:
Ottawa Citizen’s David Warren on anti-Christian rubbish taught in science class
Finnish school shooter – social Darwinism’s role
Scientists terrified that people don’t trust them?
The lazy paddlefish could have had hands, feet, but didn’t bother?
