Is Human Nature Fundamentally Selfish or Altruistic?

Published October 15, 2012 | By Iowadawg

Human inclinations are not primarily selfish: kindness and altruism have been evolutionarily valued in mates, and even the youngest children often try to be helpful

Did selfishness — or sharing — drive human evolution? Evolutionary theorists have traditionally focused on competition and the ruthlessness of natural selection, but often they have failed to consider a critical fact: that humans could not have survived in nature without the charity and social reciprocity of a group.

Last week on Slate, evolutionary anthropologist Eric Michael Johnson explored the question against the backdrop of two cultural events in 1957 — the consequences of the rogue, selfish activities of a pygmy hunter in a Congo forest, who used the group’s collective hunting efforts to benefit only himself, and in New York City, the publication of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, whose protagonist champions the author’s notion that human nature is fundamentally selfish and that each man “exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.”

Atlas Shrugged counts many politicians as admirers, perhaps most notably Republican vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, who cites the book as one of his main inspirations for entering politics and is known to give Rand’s books frequently to his interns.

So, does Rand’s theory comport with current evolutionary theory? The data is not exactly kind to her position. For example, Johnson describes an anthropologist’s account of the pygmy tribesman, Cephu, in the Congo who lived by the Randian ideal that selfishness is the highest morality. Cephu was part of the Mbuti tribe for whom “hunts were collective efforts in which each hunter’s success belonged to everybody else,” Johnson writes, detailing how the tribe “employed long nets of twined liana bark to catch their prey, sometimes stretching the nets for 300 feet. Once the nets were hung, women and children began shouting, yelling, and beating the ground to frighten animals toward the trap.”

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From HERE.

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Read it all HERE.

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Pierre Laval Is Executed for Treason (This day in 1945)

In 1942, Laval, a French politician who had advocated collaboration with Nazi Germany, came to power. His government drafted laborers for German factories, cooperated in the deportation of Jews to death camps, and instituted a rule of terror. After France was liberated by the Allies, Laval fled. He was eventually captured and returned to France, where he was convicted of treason and executed. How was Laval’s attempt to escape execution thwarted by his jailers?

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How the Arab Spring’s Prisoner Releases Have Helped the Jihadi Cause

It’s a problem.

Palestinian inmates leave a Hamas-run prison in Gaza. (Ismail Zaydah/Reuters)

The investigation of the devastating Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed American ambassador Christopher Stevens — limited as it is by security concerns that hampered the FBI’s access to the site –h as begun to focus on a Libya-based Egyptian, Muhammad Jamal (a.k.a. Abu Ahmad al Masri). As a detailed Wall Street Journal report explains, Jamal is notable not only for having fighters under his command and operating militant training camps in the Libyan desert, but also for having recently gotten out of Egyptian prison.

This latter fact makes Jamal part of a trend that has gone largely unremarked upon in the public sphere since the beginning of the “Arab Spring” uprisings: prisons in affected countries have been emptied, inmates scattering after being released or breaking free.

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The New Civil Rights Fight

Teresa Wagner’s colleagues at the University of Iowa’s law school called her smart, driven, and passionate, but somehow she was still passed over for every new position.

Wagner claims that’s because she wasn’t liberal enough for her academic bosses in a lawsuit that’s being watched closely by those who’ve long claimed universities have a left-leaning bias.

A federal trial will begin Monday in Davenport where Wagner will attempt to proved the school faculty blackballed her because she opposed abortion rights, gay marriage and euthanasia while working as a lawyer for the Family Research Council and the National Right to Life Committee in Washington.

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Iranian defector gives CIA ‘complete footage’ of nuclear sites

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This Land – Losing Sleep but Not Hope at a Diner in Elyria, Ohio

VIDEO HERE

Another day begins with a sound softer than a finger-snap, in an Ohio place called Elyria. In the central square of this small city, the gushing water fountain applauds the early-morning chorus of sparrows. A car clears its throat. A door slams. And then: click.

The faint sound comes as 7:00 flashes on the clock of the Lorain National Bank building, looming over the square. The pull of a string — click — has sent life pulsing through a neon sign, announcing to all of Elyria that, once more, against the odds, Donna’s Diner is open.

Its proprietor, Donna Dove, 57, ignites the grill that she seems to have just turned off, so seamlessly do her workdays blend into one endless shift. She wears her blond hair in a ponytail and frames her hazel eyes with black-rimmed glasses that tend to get smudged with grill grease. She sees the world through the blur of her work.

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Hezbollah’s Top Moneyman Defects To Israel

The chief financial officer of the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah has defected to Israel, the Arab media reported on Saturday.

According to Now Lebanon and Al-Arabiya, Hussein Fahs “has crossed to Israel carrying with him $5 million in embezzled money from the group. Fahs is also head of Hezbollah’s operational communications network.” According to Al-Arabiya, Fahs was arrested in September by Iranian intelligence, which suspected him of embezzlement and spying for Israel. While not explicitly stated, Fahs’s arrest appears to be his primary motivation for defecting.

According to “Hezbollah officials,” money was not the only thing Fahs took with him. He was also in possession of “classified documents and maps.” One must also assume that, as CFO of Hezbollah, he would also have been privy to an enormous amount of information about the inner workings of the group.

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