5. THE GREAT SCIENTIFIC QUESTIONS
WTM FAQ 5.6 How did unconditionally selfless behaviour become instinctive? / How do you explain the transition from Love-Indoctrination creating selfless behaviour, to that behaviour becoming instinctive?
As Jeremy Griffith explains in Part 3 of THE Interview, “how we acquired our moral instincts has been one of the greatest mysteries in biology. The primatologist Richard Wrangham described it as ‘A question that has lain unsolved at the core of biology ever since Darwin’ (review of E.O. Wilson’s 2019 book Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies). And Darwin himself described it as the ‘one special difficulty’ with his concept of natural selection (On The Origin of Species, 1859, p.209 of 440). The reason for the ‘difficulty’ is that genes normally can’t select for unconditionally selfless, fully cooperative traits, simply because such traits tend to be self-eliminating and so normally can’t become established in a species—I mean, ‘By all means, you can be selfless and sacrifice your genes for me, but I’m not about to be selfless and sacrifice my genes for you.’” Yes, selfless altruistic behaviour in a group will be exploited by ‘must-reproduce-your-genes’ selfish opportunism—by ‘the tendency of each group to quickly lose its altruism through natural selection favoring cheaters [selfish, opportunistic individuals]’ (‘Can Darwinism improve Binghamton?’, The New York Times, 9 Sep. 2011), as the biologist Jerry Coyne pointed out.
So how did humans develop unconditionally selfless, fully cooperative instincts? As Jeremy further explains in Part 3 of THE Interview, the answer was through the nurturing-based ‘Love-Indoctrination’ process: while a mother’s maternal instinct to care for her offspring is selfish (which, as mentioned, genetic traits normally have to be for them to reproduce and carry on into the next generation), from the infant’s perspective the maternalism has the appearance of being selfless. From the infant’s perspective, it is being treated unconditionally selflessly—the mother is giving her offspring food, warmth, shelter, support and protection for apparently nothing in return. So it follows that if the infant can remain in infancy for an extended period and be treated with a lot of seemingly altruistic love, it will be indoctrinated with that selfless love and grow up to behave accordingly—and over many generations that behaviour will become instinctive because genetic selection will inevitably follow and reinforce any development process occurring in a species; the difficulty lay in getting the development of unconditional selflessness to occur in the first place, for once it was regularly occurring it would naturally become instinctive over time. And if we think about primates, being semi-upright from living in trees, swinging from branch to branch, and thus having their arms free to hold a dependent infant, it’s clear that they are especially facilitated to support and prolong the mother-infant relationship, and so develop this nurtured, loving, cooperative behaviour. (This Love-Indoctrination process is presented in Freedom Essay 21, and in full in chapter 5 of FREEDOM.)
The following outlines of what instincts are, and what Darwin’s theory of natural selection is, helps in understanding how this unconditionally selfless behaviour would naturally become instinctive over time.
In FAQ 1.41, Jeremy explains what ‘instincts’ are: ‘While animals largely depend on their nervous system to coordinate their movement and control how they react to their environment, other systems such as their hormonal, circulatory, digestive, immune and reproductive systems also influence how they behave. Obviously all these systems that affect how a species of animal moves and behaves have been acted on by natural selection in the course of adapting that species over many generations to its environment. It is these naturally selected genetic traits that orientate an animal’s movements and behaviour that are referred to as its instincts. Animals move about and behave in many different ways—they fight and court each other, they build nests, they search for food, they migrate, etc—and natural selection has given them genetic programming, ‘instincts’, to control and orientate all this movement and behaviour.’
And National Geographic provides the following summary of natural selection: ‘Individuals in a population are naturally variable, meaning that they are all different in some ways. This variation means that some individuals have traits [such as instincts] better suited to the environment than others. Individuals with adaptive traits—traits that give them some advantage—are more likely to survive and reproduce. These individuals then pass the adaptive traits on to their offspring. Over time, these advantageous traits become more common in the population. Through this process of natural selection, favorable traits are transmitted through generations’ (https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/natural-selection/).
Understanding what instincts and natural selection are allows us to understand why genetic selection would inevitably follow and reinforce the selfless behaviour that resulted from Love-Indoctrination: natural variation means that some individuals in a population would have an instinctive propensity or adaptation towards selfless behaviour, and, as explained, normally those individuals would be at a dis-‘advantage’—they would self-eliminate—and so those traits would not be passed on; however, in a Love-Indoctrinated society they would not self-eliminate because all the members of the population would also be behaving selflessly. In fact, in a population where all the individuals have been trained to behave unconditionally selflessly, an instinctive adaptation for selfless behaviour would be an ‘advantage’—not in a selfish, competitive sense, but an ‘advantage’ in the sense that it is in-line with the selfless direction that Love-Indoctrination had established; as a result individuals with selfless adaptations would thrive. It follows that these individuals would produce more offspring than those without the selfless adaptations, and so over many generations the selfless adaptations would spread through the entire species, which is how humanity gained its unconditionally selfless instinctive moral soul. Again, genetic selection will inevitably follow and reinforce any development process occurring in a species; the difficulty lay in getting the development of unconditional selflessness to occur in the first place, for once it was regularly occurring it would naturally become instinctive over time—and that is what the Love-Indoctrination process did, it allowed unconditionally selfless behaviour to regularly occur and thus become instinctive.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The Love-Indoctrination explanation for humans’ moral instincts is presented in Freedom Essay 21 and in full in chapter 5 of FREEDOM, including extraordinary evidence from bonobos and from the fossil record. You might also be interested in FAQ 1.41 What are instincts and what is consciousness, and how do they differ?
