Why are we here? The first Chassidic rebbe, the Baal Shem Tov, taught that “a soul may descend to earth and live for seventy or eighty years for the sole purpose of doing a favor for another.“ Indeed, one of the main principles in Judaism is Ahavas Yisrael, that we should love our neighbors, our brothers, and our communities, just as we would ourselves. The Lubavitcher Rebbe taught that there is no difference between this love of a neighbor and love for Torah or love for G-d, that they are all of the same essence. As such, their pursuit is about as close to a purpose of life as can be expressed. What about from Science’s point of view though?
Modern Biology describes life in the capitalist vocabulary of resource limitation, competition, fitness, and selection. Patterns of speciation and extinction have followed life for as long as its traces can be found in the fossil record. We discuss adaptations as fortunate events (i.e. probabilistic) that correlate with differential survivorship and fecundity. If they make it possible for you to produce more successful offspring than your neighbor, then those progeny will have better access to environmental resources and their offspring will likewise benefit all to the detriment of the neighbors (i.e. unless the neighbors also evolve; see Red Queen Hypothesis in the glossary).
But just as science that speaks with only one voice isn’t really science at all, it is particularly interesting to consider an alternative hypotheses to the question. While studying the evolution of the cell in the 1960s, Lynn Margulis developed a theory of symbioses to explain how mitochondria came to be established within eukaryotic organisms. It didn’t involve competition so much as mutual benef. For decades, she was ridiculed and rejected by the community until genetic developments were able to confirm her controversial ideas. Dr. Margulis’ evolutionary theories however, are still not well represented in mainstream thinking. She has recently refered to the dominant Neo-Darwinist thinkers as, “a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon Biology.”
Margulis’ endosymbiont theory of evolution may be spreading roots in the field of social insect research. Here, scientists are trying to understand the evolution of altruistic behaviors in which organisms have evolved that cannot themselves reproduce and in fact may sacrifice their lives for the sake of others. For a long time, the “answer” to the problem was Kin Selection Theory, and while this may be valid in some cases, its strict dependence on relatedness between organisms is a challenge when altruism is found to occur between unrelated organisms (e.g., seed harvester ant queens that cooperatively found colonies). One of the leading ideas to explain altruism is that selection can act, not only on the level of an individual’s genes, but on the collective higher levels of biological organization. E. O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson recently described species-level selection as “the fact that group-level adaptations are seldom locally advantageous and, therefore, must be favored at a larger scale to evolve.” Their model still invokes competition, but it is clear that competition occurs at different scales and on some levels, it may not be the dominant factor. The Wilsons ended a recent paper in the The Quarterly Review of Biology with a cute Jewish analogy:
When Rabbi Hillel was asked to explain the Torah in the time that he could stand on one foot, he famously replied: “Do not do unto others that which is repugnant to you. Everything else is commentary.” Darwin’s original insight and the developments reviewed in this article enable us to offer the following onefoot
summary of sociobiology’s new theoretical foundation: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”
It scares me to consider how great of an effect our sociological frame of mind can influence our understanding of nature and corrupt our abilities as scientists. It nevertheless is predominant and requires revolutionary figures to bring us back to reality (e.g., Kinsey and Roughgarden). Modern biology has rapidly developed and has done so during the explosive growth of capitalism within the last century. The acceptance of the capitalist way of life as the primary “good” for society is almost without quesiton, and the same is pretty much true for Neo-Darwinism. Perhaps the recent economic crash will make it more possible for our theories to evolve to rely less on competitive drives and more-so embrace cooperative behavior. The Jewish concept of Ahavas Yisrael may find a foothold in science, and we may come to realize that, as Albert Einstein once said,
“The illusion that we are separate from one another is an optical delusion of our consciousness.”
