Quote:
Originally Posted by mordwyr
Your theory doesn't support all the things people do, out of duty or sacrificial love, that aren't enjoyable.
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Think of the human race being like an actual, living organism, rather than a collection of entirely independent beings. Sort of like the human body. At one point, all of the cells that make up your body (muscle cells, brain cells, skin cells, etc) were probably independent organisms without any attachment to anything else. Then these disparate cells all came together for mutual benefit. And yet the human body does things that actually hurt the individual cells when it becomes necessary for the body's survival (stopping blood flow to extremities during hypothermia, consuming fat cells during starvation, etc). This doesn't benefit the individual cell that's getting screwed over, but the likelihood that this will allow later generations of the cell to survive since the human body as a whole was preserved by its sacrifice, means that in the long run, it was still beneficial to its "race".
However, this situation didn't come about to be due to any conscious decision. It was an emergent adaptation caused by the infinitely complex mechanism that governs evolution. I'm sure this is also why a parent would give up their lives to save a child, or why a soldier would jump on a grenade to save his comrades. We've probably been programmed to do so for much the same reason, and by the same evolutionary process, that caused a fat cell to be part of an organism that will destroy it when it becomes necessary for the survival of the collective.