A Case For Compassion

There is an evolutionary basis for this observation. Charles Darwin, in his first book about humans, The Descent of Man, noted that the strongest instincts in early man were sympathy and compassion. Among our hominid predecessors, he argued, it was the community of sympathetic individuals who were more successful in raising healthy offspring to the age when they too could reproduce. That was the surest route to getting their genes to the next generation. It was a radical claim, widely discounted by later social psychologists who argued that man is primarily motivated by raw self-interest to be selfish, greedy and competitive. Recent scientific studies of emotion, however, by social psychologists like Dacher Keltner and the pscyhology lab at the University of California, Berkeley, are finding evidence that humans are hardwired for compassion and caring. These are biologically based emotions rooted deep in the mammalian brain. That makes it entirely plausible that natural selection has favoured humans who adapted to the need to care for the vulnerable.

Gail Sheehy, in foreword to Lee Kravitz's Unfinished Business