From dark hearts comes the kindness of humankind

The kind­ness of humankind most likely devel­oped from our more sin­is­ter and self-serving ten­den­cies, accord­ing to Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity and Uni­ver­sity of Ari­zona research that sug­gests society's rules against self­ish­ness are rooted in the very exploita­tion they condemn.

The report in the jour­nal Evo­lu­tion pro­poses that altru­ism -- society's pro­tec­tion of resources and the col­lec­tive good by pun­ish­ing "cheaters" -- did not develop as a reac­tion to avarice.

Instead, com­mu­nal dis­avowal of greed orig­i­nated when com­pet­ing self­ish indi­vid­u­als sought to con­trol and can­cel out one another. Over time, the direct efforts of the dom­i­nant fat cats to con­tain a few com­peti­tors evolved into a community-wide desire to guard its own well-being.

The study authors pro­pose that a sys­tem of greed dom­i­nat­ing greed was sim­ply eas­ier for our human ances­tors to man­age. In this way, the work chal­lenges dom­i­nant the­o­ries that self­ish and altru­is­tic social arrange­ments formed inde­pen­dently -- instead the two struc­tures stand as evo­lu­tion­ary phases of group inter­ac­tion, the researchers write.

Sec­ond author Andrew Gallup, a for­mer Prince­ton post­doc­toral researcher in ecol­ogy and evo­lu­tion­ary biol­ogy now a vis­it­ing assis­tant pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­ogy at Bard Col­lege, worked with first author Omar Eldakar, a for­mer Ari­zona post­doc­toral fel­low now a vis­it­ing assis­tant pro­fes­sor of biol­ogy at Ober­lin Col­lege, and William Driscoll, an ecol­ogy and evo­lu­tion­ary biol­ogy doc­toral stu­dent at Arizona.