[Marxism] Human nature may not be antithetical to socialism

["Sayan Bhattacharyya" <ok.president+marxmail@xxxxxxxxx>]

Sociable Darwinism

By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: April 8, 2007

Full: <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/08/books/review/Angier.t.html?ref=review>

"The conflict between being well behaved, being good, not gulping down
more than your share, and being selfish enough to get your fair share,
"is eternal and encompasses virtually all species on earth," he
writes, and it likely occurs on any other planet that supports life,
too, "because it is predicted at such a fundamental level by
evolutionary theory." How do higher patterns of cooperative behavior
emerge from aggregates of small, selfish units? With carrots, sticks
and ceaseless surveillance. In the human body, for example, nascent
tumor cells arise on a shockingly regular basis, each determined to
replicate without bound; again and again, immune cells attack the
malignancies, destroying the outlaw cells and themselves in the
process. The larger body survives to breed, and hence spawn a legacy
far sturdier than any tumor mass could manage.

"[...] Wilson explores the many fascinating ways in which humans are
the consummate group-thinking, team-playing animal.  [...] Humans are
equipped with all the dispositional tools needed to establish and
maintain order in the commons. Studies have revealed a deep capacity
for empathy, a willingness to trust others and become instant best
friends; and an equally strong urge to punish cheaters, to exact
revenge against those who buck group rules for private gain. [...]

"Of course, even as humans bond together in groups and behave with
impressive civility toward their neighbors, they are capable of
treating those outside the group with ruthless savagery. Wilson is not
naïve, and he recognizes the ease with which humans fall into an
us-versus-them mind-set. Yet he is a self-described optimist, and he
believes that the golden circles of we-ness, the conditions that
encourage entities at every stratum of life to stop competing and
instead pool their labors into a communally acting mega-entity, can be
expanded outward like ripples on a pond until they encompass all of us
— that the entire human race can evolve the culturally primed if not
genetically settled incentive to see our futures for what they are,
inexorably linked on the lone blue planet we share.

"Toward the end of the book he offers a series of evolutionarily
informed suggestions on how we might help widen the geometry of good
will, beginning with the italicized, boldface pronouncement that "we
are not fated by our genes to engage in violent conflict." Our bloody
past does not foretell an inevitably bloody future, and violent
behaviors that make grim sense in one context can become maladaptive
in another. [...]"

Full: <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/08/books/review/Angier.t.html?ref=review>

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