The Necessity of the Absurd

"We owe civilsation to beliefs which in our modern opinion we no longer regard as true, which are not true in the sense of science (scientific truths), but which nevertheless were a condition for the majority of mankind to submit to moral rules whose functions they did not understand, they could never explain, [and] in which indeed to all rationalist critics very soon appeared to be absurd."

 Friedrich Hayek, "Evolution and Spontaneous Order"
The 33rd Meeting of Nobel Laureates at Lindau, 1983

Driven by Adaptability

"From a "selfish gene" perspective, competitiveness and greed need no particular explanation beyond the obvious - I'll do whatever I can to get my genes into the next generation, even if that means stomping on all the little people on my way to the top. But if helping others by being selfless and altruistic decreases the chances of getting my genes into the next generation, why would I do it? The short answer is that it is a myth that evolution is driven by selfishness; it is, in fact, driven by adaptability, and in a social primate species like ours, more often than not the most adaptable thing you can do to survive and reproduce is to be cooperative and altruistic." (Shermer, pg. 125)

A Sense of Justice

"The notion that bad individuals should not be allowed to prosper does not exist in most species, yet it has been crucial to human evolution. It permits collaboration and has thus done as much as language and culture to allow human civilisation to flourish and people to dominate the planet.

A sense of justice argues that people should be free to keep the fruits of their labours, but also that the over-mighty rich need to be cut down from time to time and the poor occasionally exalted. It damns the murderer while recognising that, sometimes, even murder is justified. The perverted bargain with justice which Tosca makes is the heart of the opera’s tragedy. A sense of justice, then, reins in people’s other Darwinian instincts and curbs their excesses. For human nature has evolved to be both good and bad—and it is evolution that allows human nature to know the difference."

The Economist, December 18th, 2008