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Don’t misread Darwin: for humans, ‘survival of the fittest’ means being sympathetic | Aeon Videos

Don’t misread Darwin: for humans, ‘survival of the fittest’ means being sympathetic | Aeon Videos

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One of the shockwaves from Charles Darwin’s idea that humans evolved from other animals was moral panic. If our ethics are not guided by an omnipotent and all-knowing god and, instead, life is driven by ‘survival of the fittest’ via natural selection, how could we possibly expect humans to behave with anything other than brash self-interest? Yet Darwin’s use of the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ was hardly meant to suggest that existence was a knockdown, drag-out fight – he was very clear that generosity, sympathy and all those other traits that give us warm feelings are central to human survival. In this short video, the psychologist Dacher Keltner at the University of California, Berkeley puts kindness in evolutionary context, connecting his own recent neural-imaging work on compassion with Darwin’s view that sympathy is a cornerstone of human flourishing.
— Read on aeon.co/videos/dont-misread-darwin-for-humans-survival-of-the-fittest-means-being-sympathetic

And poetry expands our ability to by empathetic.

You’ve got to be taught To hate

You’ve got to be taught To hate

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You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught

“South Pacific” Richard Rodgers

You’ve got to be taught

To hate and fear,

You’ve got to be taught

From year to year,

It’s got to be drummed

In your dear little ear

You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid

Of people whose eyes are oddly made,

And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,

You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,

Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate,

You’ve got to be carefully taught!