Wednesday, September 22, 2021

Love , not War

By - Charles Brown

original humans relied more than other species on each other , on kinship relations and cultural communications from dead generations of our species . Human individual bodies were relatively frail and weak , and bi-pedalism made them slow runners. So, humans were very interdependent and highly social by nature. Our species name should be _homo socialis_. or _homo communis_ . Selfishness and greed would have been selected against in the Darwinian sense. So, the answer is not both, but social. Greed and selfishness arise with civilization, after hundreds of thousands of years of "love thy neighbor as thyself" as the central principle of human societies , and the key to our adaptive advantage and ticket to the top of the food chain. Love thy neighbor as THYSELF is not self-less. It is wise in that the best way to love yourself is to get along with others well.

Now individual mortal beings, animals, do have an instinct of self-preservation, to avoid death. But dangers of death or injury did not come from other individuals of the same species. War is against our individual instinct and our species's original nature, which was peaceful toward other members of the species.

" The decisive battle between early culture and human nature must have been waged on the field of primate sexuality…. Among subhuman primates sex had organized society; the customs of hunters and gatherers testify eloquently that now society was to organize sex…. In selective adaptation to the perils of the Stone Age, human society overcame or subordinated such primate propensities as selfishness, indiscriminate sexuality, dominance and brute competition. It substituted kinship and co-operation for conflict, placed solidarity over sex, morality over might. In its earliest days it accomplished the greatest reform in history, the overthrow of human primate nature, and thereby secured the evolutionary future of the species."

— Sahlins, M. D. 1960 The origin of society. Scientific American 203(3): 76–87.

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