About helping others

Someone I know once said she doesn't like asking for help, for anything from anyone. It seems to me that this is quite a common way of seeing things. But if I'm honest, I see this way of thinking as kind of stupid. I'm not saying that people shouldn't be able to be resourceful and mostly take care of themselves. They should. Riding a bike, using a screwdriver, sowing, making pancakes, knowing how to change a light bulb or find a job... They're all incredibly useful things to know how to do. But I am saying that no one can or should be able to do everything.

Actually, let's start somewhere else.

Let's start with survival of the fittest. Now, as a recently graduated master of evolutionary biology, the way survival of the fittest is often portrayed in a lot of places where a non-biologist would run into the concept, is something that annoys me so, so much. It is often thought to mean that the fastest, strongest, biggest, toughest, the most aggressive will survive best, find mates best. This is not what it means. (Well, in some cases it can practically mean that. But that's not what it means.) It means that those who are best adapted to their environment will die less than those who are less well adapted. What "best adapted" means completely depends on the environment and on the other species that inhabit it. Fitness isn't a measure of physical ability. It is simply a measure of who is best at passing on their genes. Who has the most babies who grow up to have babies of their own. The genes of those individuals are the ones that will be selected for. The whole species, gradually, becomes more like those individuals.

So let's move on to humans. We're incredibly well adapted to pretty much every terrestrial environment on the planet. We have practically taken over Earth. And it's not because the ancient, ancient ancestors whose genetic material we all now carry were the fastest, or the strongest, or the toughest. It wasn't even that they had opposable thumbs, which are admittedly incredibly handy, but all primates have those. Their superpower was one far more impressive: our amazing, wonderful capacity of cooperation.

I would like to argue that without it, we would still be living (only) in the lush African forests. Of course this is a very "what if" -kind of situation and we can't actually know what would have happened, but I would still like to argue that it's very plausible.

Cooperation is ingrained so deeply into us as a species there's no getting away from it. We are one of the few mammals who provide biparental care (meaning that both (assumed) parents (but paternal uncertainty is a topic for another day) take care of the young) to our children. This behavior is otherwise mostly seen in birds. Not only that, we are cooperative breeders: the parents don't only have each other to help with ensuring the child is fed and healthy and safe, they have the rest of the community too. It takes a village to raise a child is a proverb for a reason. One hypothesis suggested to explain male homosexuality is cooperative breeding. It is known that the more older brothers a man has, the more likely he is to be gay. It could be that at some point it's better to simply help said brothers with their kids and ensure the nieces and nephews carrying a portion of your genes survive than to compete with your brothers for the females. (Of course, considering that homosexuality is seen literally all over the animal kingdom, there is obviously a lot more to it than that, but in humans it could be a contributing factor.)

This cooperative breeding also increases the number of kids we can potentially have (which might not be relevant in today's world, but is the only thing that ultimately matters in evolution). Our babies are at birth significantly less developed than those of other great apes (that's what you get for wanting to have huge brains at the same time as a bipedal stance that makes the hole the heads holding those brains have to fit through significantly smaller than they would otherwise be), and that means a lot of that development has to happen after birth. Despite this, if I remember correctly from my lectures, the natural human inter-birth interval, meaning how often a female on average has a baby, is approximately three years, whereas in orangutans, a mostly solitary great ape, it is eight. We are able to have babies that take so, so much effort to raise so frequently, because we have had the help of our communities to do that.

But it's not all about babies. Well, it's evolution. It's ultimately mostly about babies. But our capacity to cooperate extends beyond that. Want to take down a mammoth? Get some friends together, you can't do it without their help. Everyone wins, because mammoths are huge and there's plenty to eat for everyone. Want to make a super cool stone axe? There's probably someone around who can teach and help you. And who knows, maybe with their guidance, you can figure out how to make an even cooler axe than they make, and then later teach someone your way of doing it, and they can make it even better. Any technological advancements require building on what others have already done, and that requires that someone teaches you the things that are already known. We would still be using stones as tools if it wasn't for our ability and willingness to cooperate and share what we know, so others can continue our work after we are gone.

We have evolved to cooperate, because it makes everyone better. And those individuals who didn't know how to do it didn't take down the mammoth. They died alone, because ultimately, we need each other to survive and thrive.

This, of course, leads to a lot of interesting questions about our need to truly feel like we belong to a community and how the social structure of the world we live in today is so very, very different from hunter-gatherer societies we evolved in, of even small agricultural communities. It's too easy to isolate ourselves from the rest of the world, to end up in a place where we lack meaningful human contact, and then, because we still have that inherent need for a community, we find ourselves with mental health problems, or join whatever group makes us feel like they can provide us with that community.

 

But all that, I think, is a topic for another day. For today, I have said enough, even though there would be a lot more to say. I never got around to talking about our immense capacity empathy, for example, even though it is obviously deeply intertwined with everything I've been talking about here.

Either way, for now I want to leave you with this:

Helping each other makes us all better. It is what makes us great.

~matu