As part of the discussion of free will and determinism in my philosophy classes we talked about evolutionary psychology and the idea of the "selfish gene." One of the foremost popularizers of this view is Robert Wright who in the lecture below claims that human compassion and the Golden Rule are genetically based and hard wired into our biological nature by evolution.
This view is fraught with problems. For example, Wright seems to argue that because we have the genes for compassion that therefore compassion is good, but then cruelty and selfishness must also be genetic. So, why are they not good? What standard does Wright use to decide that compassion is good and cruelty is not? Unfortunately, he has none other than that he prefers one and not the other. It's a purely arbitrary judgment on his part. He likes what compassion does and dislikes what cruelty does, and so he declares compassion good, and counts on an audience steeped in the subliminal assumptions of a Judeo-Christian heritage to agree with him. He could have made the same argument, though, substituting cruelty, and it would be just as valid. If our genes program us to act cruelly, which they surely must, then cruelty is good.
The first nine minutes or so of the video are the most interesting:
How do we know that we have a "compassion gene" anyway? Such a gene has never been found and its existence is purely speculative, but it leads us to one of the interesting aspects of Wright's hypothesis. The theory that there is a gene for compassion may be testable. If Wright's correct then as we elucidate more and more of the genome we should be able to find genes that program us for compassionate behavior. If we don't the idea of a genetic basis for morality becomes much less likely to be true, and we'll have to look elsewhere for a basis for human moral sentiments.
RLC