Loving One's Neighbor as an Evolutionary Adaptation

Jesus emphasized the primacy of the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law from the Hebrew Scriptures — love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself — and stressed that our "neighbor" is anyone who crosses our path.  His teaching on this point is laid out in greatest detail in the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10.25-37. 

Empathy and altruism, encapsulated in the second part of this teaching, have long struck me as being somehow part of the fabric of the universe.  That's why I was intrigued by a Washington Post report of a recent scientific study, indicating that chimpanzees do not have the same altruistic bent that humans do.  My interest was especially caught by the scientists' conjecture that humanity's intellectual capacities may somehow be linked to our propensity for empathy and altruism. 

Excerpts (with extra paragraphing and emphasis added):

A team of scientists led by Joan B. Silk of the University of California at Los Angeles conducted two sets of experiments with chimps living in captivity in Texas and Louisiana to measure their propensity for altruism.

More then [sic] two dozen were presented with an apparatus that gave them two options: They could choose to get food only for themselves, or they could get food in a way that also gave some to another chimp.

The chimps, though, were no more inclined to go for the option that gave food to another chimp even if they knew the other chimp and it was clear that being generous would cost them nothing.

"Humans are an unusually prosocial species -- we vote, give blood, recycle, give tithes and punish violators of social norms," the team wrote Thursday in the journal Nature.

"Experimental evidence indicates that people willingly incur costs to help strangers in anonymous one-shot interactions, and that altruistic behavior is motivated, at least in part, by empathy and concern for the welfare of others."

*  *  *

The study results . . . may indicate that such behavior is "tied to sophisticated capacities for cultural learning, theory of mind, perspective taking and moral judgment," the researchers wrote.

In evolutionary terms, empathy and altruism, whether accidental or learned, can give a group a distinct survival advantage.  In his book Non-Zero, Robert Wright writes that an Eskimo hunting team that kills a whale will typically be generous in sharing the proceeds with unsuccessful teams.  This practice works out well for all the teams in the long run, because:

• A successful team and their families usually won't be able to consume the whole whale before spoilage sets in. 
• That particular team won't necessarily be successful in the next hunt. 
• A good place for the successful team to store its surplus — to save up for an uncertain future — is in the bellies of other teams, who will be expected return the favor when they are the successful ones.
• Over the long term, Eskimo whale-hunting teams that practice such generosity are more likely to survive the rigors of the harsh Arctic environment.  And, crucially, their children are likewise more likely to survive long enough to have children of their own.

Sociologist Rodney Stark makes a similar point in The Rise of Christianity.  He theorizes that the church's emphasis on mutual care (i) made early Christians and their children more likely to survive disease, earthquakes, and other perils of life, and (ii) made the church itself more attractive to potential converts, thus promoting the long-term survival of the church as a cohesive, organized group.

Loving one's neighbor can thus be thought of as an extremely useful evolutionary adaptation.  Other things being equal, an empathic, altruistic culture is more likely to be successful over the long term than an ungenerous one. 

This is of course an oversimplification.  Natural selection has also ensured that we will be willing to devote proportionally more of our resources to the well-being of our own children or kin than to that of a random stranger. 

Morever, the world is not all empathy and altruism.  Competition, sometimes ferocious and even deadly, still plays a major role too.  But there again, other things being equal, a cohesive group, of the kind promoted by empathy and altruism, will typically be more effective as a competitor than an uncohesive one.

*  *  *

Empathy and altruism can be innate, but they can also be taught.  In his teachings, Jesus emphasized both qualities; in the Great Commission, he directed his disciples to do the same.

The importance of love of neighbor was not original to Jesus; it's found in the Hebrew Scriptures (see Lev. 19:18).  But Jesus added something else:  that our neighbors are not just family members and fellow tribsemen, but everyone who crosses our path.   

In stressing the commandment to to love and care for our fellow man — and in directing us to teach the nations to obey this commandment — Jesus promoted a mindset that has been responsible for much of humanity's progress, and that we have every reason to think will continue to do so.

*  *  *

I want to paraphrase and elaborate on a comment by the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne in one of his books.  God didn't create a ready-made world; he did something much more clever than that.  He created a world that, over eons of time, is in fact making itself — in ways we have barely begun to observe, let alone to understand.

The mind boggles; the soul shouts praises.