Skeptopia

Last year I read The Science of Good and Evil by Michael Shermer. I’ve always been interested in human behavior, that is, why we behave the way we do, and I found the book to be a fascinating look at morality from a secular, scientific, evolutionary point of view. Humans are, after all, merely animals like any other, but with complicated behaviors that often seem difficult to predict. I think people, especially philosophers and religious folks, tend to think that because humans are capable of reason and intellect, we can somehow overcome human nature.

The problem with any utopia is that it fails to take into account actual human behavioral patterns. As I postulated when I was around 12 or 13 years old (and having my first “deep, profound thoughts”), in a perfect world, there would be no need for the words “thank you” or “I’m sorry”. The appreciation and remorse would be understood. In a perfect world, people would never need to thank each other, because people would simply always share. It would be the norm and so thanking someone would be redundant and pointless. In a perfect world, no one would intentionally cause anyone harm, so any harm done by another person would be merely accidental, and of course, they would be sorry and the person harmed would not be angry at them. However, we don’t live in a perfect world. People are jerks. People lie. People cheat. People steal. People do petty crap. People are sometimes lazy and sometimes selfish. It just the way we evolved and for a good reason. Read the rest of this entry »