Does the urge to care come from biology?

Nature and Nurture

    If we want to know where the “urge to care” comes from, the obvious starting point is with the materialistic explanation.  “Materialism” is that school of thought that says that all values, all meaning, are a function of the material world, the world that my friend Chip says has “a high pokability quotient.”  Looking for explanations of behavior in the material world  is what we were taught in grade school.  Values, moral priorities, are the result of either nature or nurture, of our biology or of our environment.  Or, as recent science suggests, of some combination of those two.  But of nothing beyond the material world.  According to the materialist, to pursue the Good must be something that is producible out of our biological and/or social conditions, nothing more.
    Let’s see where this leads.

Nature

    First, biology.  Today there seems little question that some amount of human behavior is a function of our biological conditions.  I have been posing these materialistic alternatives (biology and culture) in my lectures for over 30 years.  Frankly, when I started, I included biology purely for the sake of completeness.  Then we had kids. 
    There is nothing like having three kids to demonstrate how much human behavior is hard-wired.  I remember one evening when (and don’t ask me why we agreed to this, because I have no idea) two of our children, one girl and one boy, had sleepover parties at our house on the same night. 
    Shortly after arriving, all six of the eight year old girls had dug deep into the “dress up chest” and were bedecked in satin and feathers. 
    Within minutes of “deploying,” my six year old son’s friends were armed to the teeth, with anything that could remotely pass for armaments, like a cardboard paper towel roll stuck into the belt, the better to play “pirate with a cutlass.” 
    I know – such differences could still be the result of complex, subtle and very early learning, but anyone who has had a two year old son knows that, when the “gun gene” kicks in, there doesn’t seem to be much relationship to environmental influences.  
    As of this writing, the literature on the genetic basis for human behavior, including complex emotions, is growing.  It is easy to make the natural selection argument on how human beings became a caring species.  Assume that we could view two tribes of our ancient protoancestors.  One tribe shares a mutated gene that causes a significant number of the members of the tribe to care for others within the tribe.  The other group never had this gene, and so everyone pretty much looks out for themselves.  In which group are members more likely to survive to the age of reproduction?  Given the harsh realities of their environment and the inherently social nature of human survival efforts, the members of a community that had sufficient numbers caring for each other would be more likely to survive to puberty than those members of a “every one for themselves” tribe. 

Could be, but . . .

    Thirty-five  years ago, when I was first forming these ideas, there were only a few people who were arguing that caring is a function of biology.  But over the decades, science has suggested that this source of caring can’t be ignored.  A few years ago, it might have been truthfully said that even the most ardent of materialists weren’t arguing that all morality could be explained by biology, but today that argument is heard, albeit with only a small credence yet assigned to it.  But that credibility is growing.
    It may be that someday science will offer convincing explanations that reduce morality to biology.  Were that to happen, human life would lose a measure of its nobility.  A heightened moral imagination, rather than something of which to be proud, would be merely the predetermined result of genomic causes.  Since today the science is far from that position, I choose to believe that the extraordinary experience of virtue I feel when I do Good or when I observe the virtuous behavior of others is more than a proteinomic response.  I choose to retain respect for the dignity of human Goodness beyond our DNA.