Squirrels, survival and altruism...
thanks to Joyce Miller for passing this on - now I'm passing it on to you -
The article below in the Huffington Post contains a section about the importance of altruism to survival of the species: Here is the section -- it is about a graduating senior's speech at a commencement. The link is at the bottom of the page. Written by Aryanna Huffington (sp?) who was receiving an honorary doctorate:
First up was Elyse VyVy Trinh, a child of Vietnamese refugees. Her speech was entitled "An Education in Altruism." She began by describing her early years at Brown, which were steeped in the humanities, in search of answers to timeless questions such as: "How is it that war can turn brothers against each other? How is it that poverty can persist in a land of abundance? How is it that democratic legislation could have ever defended inequality based on skin color?"
She then switched to biology and had an epiphany of sorts involving squirrels. Yes, squirrels. Her sudden insight didn't come from an actual squirrel, but from a 1977 paper she read by biologist Paul Sherman. He sought to explain why, when faced with a predator in the vicinity, some squirrels would cry out to attract the predator's attention, thus sacrificing themselves so that other squirrels would be spared. This behavior would seem to contradict evolution, because such altruism would not be genetically passed on and would thus be selected out. But, as Trinh explained:
' ...it is the gene or the genome that is 'trying' to survive, not the individual, nor the species. Thus if a squirrel perishes but in doing so saves his brothers (those who share much of his genome), his genes still survive and are still the fittest. The study offered to the scientific world the evolutionary basis of altruism.'
This understanding put Trinh on the path to concluding that "development of conscience is precisely the point of an education...to connect our critical thinking with empathy." She realized that "somewhere along the evolutionary history of humankind, the collection of genes encoding the tendency to love, even at the cost of individual pain, was selected for because loving makes us more fit for our environment than not loving." It also caused her to see science differently. What she saw in her diligent science classmates was that "their main tool was data, but it was narrative and story that inspired them -- whether the story of their own families' struggles or the story of a child they didn't even know going to bed hungry."
So her study of the humanities and of the sciences all came together. It is "when these seemingly irreconcilable worlds of art and science come together," she said, "that we are able to create the solutions that our world so urgently needs."
She concluded by saying that "compassion is the enduring and most important connection among of all fields of study," and that "we must listen to our altruistic impulses if we wish to collectively survive and thrive." By that point I was ready to give her my honorary doctorate.
Links
- 8 months ago
- • 0 comments (Add)
- • Share
