Genetically
Hopeful
“Wherever
my story takes me, however dark and difficult the theme, there is
always hope and redemption, not because readers like a happy ending,
but because I am an optimist at heart. I know the sun will rise in
the morning, that there is light at the end of every tunnel.”
Michael
Morpurgo
I don't know about you,
but I don't like sad endings. I went to see the movie, Victoria and
Abdul, last night, and walked out of the theater sad. Life sometimes
does not end happily, especially where vengeance and greed are
involved. I guess I've now seen enough films about monarchs, and read
enough accounts of their lives, to know that wealth and power are not
always a blessing. The shining beacon in that true story was
Victoria's love and appreciation for Abdul, and his genuine love and
loyalty to her. Notice here how love is the beacon of hope. Those two
things, love and hope, are hand-in-glove. One does not have to go far
in today's world to run into these two opposing forces—love and
hate. They are pulling against each other in a cosmic tug of war to
see which will win. My money is on love. I'm an eternal optimist,
too.
I heard an interview with
Jane Goodall on Science Friday yesterday. The interviewer asked if her lifetime of studies with chimpanzees, our closest relatives in
the animal kingdom, had taught her much about human behavior. She
commented on the dominance play of chimps, which could be rough but
not usually violent, but also said that chimps are, without doubt,
capable of brutal violence. They will kill other chimps in an
organized way, (“coalition warfare”) as a group against an
individual, or against a smaller group. This appears to be based on
competition for resources, or extending the range of their home turf.
Richard Wrangham reported this same finding, but said that chimps in
his study had “an appetite for hunting and killing,” paving the
way for human beings to be genetically predisposed toward violence.
Fortunately, there is a
glimmer of hope here. Wrangham also said that human beings may be
“cursed with a demonic temperament, but we are also blessed with
an intelligence that can, through acquisition of wisdom, draw us away
from the five-million-year stain of our ape past.” Further, we
are capable of “self-control, empathy and reason,” and we
have cultivated moral norms. Whew! Now, we just need to tip the
scales toward the hopeful end of the gene pool. I have great hope
that this will happen.
The sooner the better.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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