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Sissela Bok - Human Kind: Is selflessness in our nature?

Integral options cafe

Integral Options café offers a place to discuss all things related to a Buddhist worldview, complete. While theory is important (Buddhism, Ken Wilber, Spiral Dynamics, psychology, and Integral Theory), is politics, art and poetry, human values, popular culture, and humor. I invite comments, different points of view, and anything that can add to public discussion of life in an integrated world.

ROM Aesop's fables to those of La Fontaine, speaking of animals-monkeys, wolves in sheep's clothing, grasshoppers, ants, exhibited human weaknesses and vices and virtues casual.In doing so, they challenge the rigid boundaries between humans and other species as well as the shared vision of human wrongdoing as "bestial" in nature, declared an end Erasmus deeply unfair to the animals, given the scale of violence and deception practiced by human beings.

Words of Charles Darwin, near the end of The Descent of Man, may have echoed Erasmus: "I would as soon as he comes down from the heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy to save the life of his guardian. . . as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.”

In his engaging book The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness , Oren Harman, a professor of the history of science at Bar Ilan University in Israel, presents a wealth of scientific research bearing on forms of cooperation, helpfulness, even self-sacrifice among many species.Altruism has been "a thorn in the side of Darwin wrong," said Harman, a Darwinian puzzle that would need to solve, given their point of view of the relentless struggle between living things to survive:

Why build amoeba stems from their own body, sacrificing in the process, so that some can rise and be carried away of scarcity to abundance on the legs of an insect harmless or the wings of a wind happy? Why the blood from vampires mouth to mouth at the end of a night of prey with members of the colony are less successful in the hunt?. . .And what does all this have to do with morality in humans: Is it, in fact, naturally occurring in our own acts of kindness?