Who We Are: Part I

Longevity, Cooperativism and Human Nature



Philosophers have historically taken the three highly simplified views of human nature and have built various models consisting of differing degrees of complexity. Jean Jacques Rousseau believed that we are by nature good and that we are corrupted by society (the “noble savage”). The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre held that human nature is neutral, with an individual’s free will being the sole element that decides our actions. According to Sartre as humans we have a radical freedom to the point that we are “condemned to be free.” Others that share his view of neutrality often give control largely to environmental socialization and conditioning (such as B.F. Skinner). Then there was Thomas Hobbes who held that human nature is bad. In Leviathan Hobbes wrote, “So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” He thought that any goodness exhibited by someone was the result of society keeping that person’s dark side in check. Otherwise, without society’s restrictions, human existence would be “nasty, short, and brutish.”

There is a growing body of scientific studies that now point towards an understanding that humans have a hardwired predisposition in which working together appears to be intrinsically reinforcing and which in turn encourages future cooperative behavior. Studies show that this drive is so powerful that if someone fails to cooperate then another person will go out of his or her own way to punish the uncooperative one, even at his or her own sacrifice. This revelation of the cooperative nature of humankind is so important that it deserves close examination.

A recent study by Brigham Young, published in the Public Library of Science, found that having social relations can actually increase one’s longevity. They took the results of 148 studies involving 138,000 people and combined them. What they found was a clear statistical trend that indicates that having strong social relations could increase a person’s lifespan in comparison by as much as four years.

What we see in this study is natural selection at work in the evolution of early humans. Those early humans who were by nature cooperative lived longer and therefore had more babies than their less cooperative peers. Over time the cooperative members of our human ancestors became dominant in the species and the “rugged isolationists” became a rarity.

In the next installment I will look at another study which involves social networking that found further support for cooperativism being hardwired within our nature