Biologist here.

If we were meant to be selfish and lazy and arrogant and greedy, then we wouldn’t be forming tribes and packs and groups and villages and towns and cities and governments and militaries and social groups and so on and so on. We wouldn’t have survived. We would have been living solitary lives like male lions. Instead, most people naively look at a bacterium eating until it bursts, or a cat hissing at another cat for no apparent reason, or a praying mantis eating another praying mantis that it just copulated with, and we think “oh that’s exactly how nature is meant to work, all around, no exceptions”. In truth, when you look at most vertebrate animals, we all exhibit varying degrees of cooperativeness, all powered by empathy and fear of social pressure (for when empathy fails). Most of all vertebrates, this is exhibited by mammals. And most of all mammals, you see it in primates. And most of all primates (by very few degrees in some cases by the way), you see it in humans.

Humans specifically evolved to be cooperative. Our cooperative nature is what gave us an edge to survive until the beginning of history. You can find many examples and anthropological evidence, but the simplest one is how Homo sapiens (more cooperative and able to maintain bigger groups) managed to out-survive the Neanderthals (less cooperative and spread into much smaller groups).

You can observe it in our physiology. Our brains have an extremely developed system of empathetic neurons. We feel the plight of others, and our natural instinct is to help them. This would be a pretty big disadvantage if the idea is that selfishness wins the day. You can see this in action very clearly in children of all ages:

• When one baby cries, all other babies in the room start crying too. If one is in danger, perhaps we are all in danger. Let’s cry together to save ourselves.

• When a child’s toy breaks, often another child will come along and offer them another toy (free of charge too). We don’t want to see others be sad, because that makes us sad.

• If you ask a child “Would you prefer that you get ice cream, but your brother doesn’t, or would you prefer that both of you get ice cream?” They’ll almost always answer “Both”. Even if we don’t stand to lose anything, we don’t want to make decisions that make others suffer unnecessarily.

• If a teacher asks a teenager to tell on another teenager about some minor transgression, they’ll almost always refuse, even if they don’t like the other person. Mutual support is ingrained in us. We don’t want to let down other members of our group, because group cohesion is more important than individual success. Even in the most selfish sense, we instinctively fear that the rest of the group will shun us for bringing harm to one of our own.

You can also see it in adults even. Every time there’s a disaster in some far corner of the world, and the calls come for help, along with the videos and posts showing the desperation and fear, then total strangers suddenly rush to embrace the victims across the internet by volunteering, sending aid, messages of support, or even the mere act of checking up again to see how things turned out.

What happens rather is that we have built a system that systematically dismantles our cooperative instincts in favour of individualism. This is one reason we all feel unhappy at such high rates. Every time we see a beggar on the street and turn the other way, every time we hear of someone else’s problems and we choose to ignore it, every time we come at a crossroads where we choose between our careers and the well-being of ourselves and others around us, every single time we go into battle against our nature and we kill a bit of ourselves. And then we convince ourselves that the mutilated and unrecognized carcass that our psyche has become, that that abomination is how we always were and how all humans are. It makes it just a bit more bearable to live with ourselves.

Take away this system, and suddenly you can raise new generations that act perfectly well according to the human nature that brought us all the way to here. Again, this is easily observable. Travel in less developed countries away from the centers of capitalism, and see how people in a community behave to each other. Not just day-to-day politeness, but actually how their system is set up around cooperation and mutual aid. Upbringing is a key we constantly ignore when we discuss this “human nature”.

For rich people, the effects of this psychic self-mutilation are even worse. The upper classes convince themselves that they are somehow better than everybody else. That they are almost an entirely different species. That those who toil under them don’t deserve anything better. That the rich are rich because they are the smartest, bestest, gentlest, humanest humans to be around. And then they raise their children to believe this shit from birth. And then they raise their children, and so on. The result is that one way or the other, the rich and powerful separate themselves from the rest of the group. They make their own group. And then they see how small their group is, and how big our group is, and they start getting paranoid on what we will do to them for abusing us. Actually they are not afraid because they are abusing us. They are afraid because they see us the way they see the rest of the world. They are selfish, greedy and moralless and so they think we are too. They think we are out to get them and steal their stuff, the same way they operate. Which gives them even more reason to abuse us, suppress us and lie to us about a variety of stuff like “it is our god-given right to amass this much wealth” or “it’s human nature”. And that is exactly when societies break down.

Initially, Ancient Rome had a vast area around the city designated as public land. This land didn’t just belong to the state, it belonged to everyone. This was really good arable land too. So every family in Rome, be it patrician, plebeian or proletarian was given a certain lot from this land to farm and work as they see fit in order to support their family. Furthermore, another big portion of this land was kept owner-less and was tended by slaves (unfortunately) and paid labourers to produce food which was allotted to the entire population of the city. This land could actually produce enough food to feed about 200 000 people every year. Extremely big and extremely fertile land. And no family could own more than a tiny fraction of this land.

So for around 500 years this set-up was maintained, until some patrician decided to run a scheme where they’d use the names of dead soldiers to allot plots of public land to their “miraculously alive” persons, and through them he would own the land. He then wanted to acquire even more land by using gangs of thugs to convince other families to sell rights of work on their lots to other fictitious personas he created. Pretty soon all the other patricians followed suit (for fear of missing out). About 50 years later (150 BC) most of this land was in the hands of the patricians and everybody knew it. Efforts to reverse this land theft were met with brutal repression (Michael Parenti covers this in his book on Julius Caesar if you are interested). We are talking actual death squads roaming free through the city and killing thousands within a few days. Eventually this is what led to the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire about 300 years later. It wasn’t the inherent greed of all Romans that did this (EDIT: Actually the vast majority of Romans, including some of the aristocrats were constantly banding together to fight this; you know… cooperating). It was rather the greed of a select few individuals, who had set up a system where they had all the power and all the means to act upon this greed.

Your friend sounds like a very bad biologist to me. Probably a biochemist :P

You should ask them if they are greedy and selfish and if they say no ask them what makes them so special that they are immune to their so called human nature.

your friend is a shitty biologist. it is a common understanding that animals and humans engage in cooperation. there are species that survive purely on cooperation. competition is not a natural law.

Natural selection is about genetic traits and not about hierarchy or or some supremacy slop. And your biologist friend should know that.

Edit: and using natural selection to say that some groups of people are prone to hierarchical tendencies reeks of Social Darwinism and eugenics.

What they describe as “hoooman nature” is societal conditioning. Ask them if it makes a difference if people grow up in a poor household or a rich, have a childhood without education or with elite schools and coaching, have grown up in Nazi Germany or the USA (the last one might fire back).

In our capitalistic society we are trained for competition from early on. Our schools and our jobs are build for competing instead of cooperation. That is a choice that benefits out owners.

We all agree that we are very much shaped by our surroundings until our world view needs us to ignore that.

Ask him to connect ambition and natural selection to dissolving social structures, rather than the actual historical trend of technology and class dynamics shifting towards larger and more complex production and distribution. Ask why states appeared, and why capitalism arose when it did and how it did. Take a historical materialist stance, and elaborate on how the rise of the industrial proletariat sublimates present class society and erodes the basis of the state, class struggle, as we gradually collectivize production and distribution.

i think the most essential and simple way to counter this argument is to explain how biology is a fundamentally insufficent explanation for the development of society

the biology and genome of today’s human and the humans of ~20,000 years ago are functionally the same, if not identical. and yet, all of modern history has occurred within that period. how do we explain the explosion of population associated with the development of capitalism, the extreme advancement of technology etc with a biological reasoning? it just doesn’t make sense

then you have separated biological and social darwinism. there is some truth to the latter in that the superior or more efficient survive, whereas the weak will eventually fall to the wayside. the catch is that this applies to social systems, and not individuals. and, what determines social systems if not biology? the production of what sustains us, what satisfies human need. this would be a good time to demonstrate how things like the development of the factory system and the socialization of production explain the rise of capitalism and the overthrow of feudalism. i think this is a good start

I mean he is not wrong saying that social structures eventually “disolve”, however its not because of human nature but through the development of production. Also it’s not that they disolve but they’re transformed and shaped into new ones, what he calls “human nature” is on constant change. A peasant in the middle ages did not behave in the same way as an industrial worker in the 19th century nor a blue collar worker in the 21th century, some biological needs do stay constant like eating/sleeping/shitting but our social behaviour is heavily conditiones to how the society is organized, which in part is conditioned to the level of development of production.

We evolved to what we did because of our ability to cooperate (or rather there were selective pressures where this ability was considered advantageous) - it is the social structures, generational knowledge passed down and the cognitive abilities including language, empathy etc that evolved with it that allowed us to climb the top of the so called food chain. The selective pressure (in the evolution of human beings) is vastly in favour of cooperation. This is also evident in multiple aspects of nature; heck even the process of evolving from unicellular to multicellular organisms.

This is basic biology and therefore he is lying. He is essentially talking about “survival of the fittest” the way layman may talk about it, not how the scientific discipline of biology would actually consider it.

All life forms could be considered a spectrum from cooperative cells to malignant tumours and to only consider one end of the spectrum and not the other especially if it is your discipline isn’t just wilfully ignorant; it is straight up fraudulent.

This is also ignoring the fact whether being “natural” is a good in itself. Is ebola or childhood retinal blastoma “good” because they are natural?

Book recommendation: The Dialectical Biologist by Levin and Lewontin.

(I would not necessarily argue with him unless you want to make clear you’re not going to deal with his nonsense. He is clearly not speaking in good faith. Like why the fuck did he study biology; to pass witness on the world as is and not to alter it anyway given the immortal goodness of its naturalness? Some Nietzschean BS.)

I would also internalise this article - it explains the birth of the modern West and how capitalism takes credit for socialist pressures without which there is no development as we know it (as this is really the subtext he was alluding to):

https://redsails.org/concessions/

Furthermore, pointing out that Einstein considered himself socialist usually causes some congitive dissonance to these STEM right wingers:

https://monthlyreview.org/articles/why-socialism/

Here’s how I approach the argument https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10530205/7669396

Human nature is just like animal nature. Eat, drink, sleep, fuck, piss, shit, die. That is all there is to it. Everything after that is learned societal conditioning.

Is it cat’s and dog’s nature to fight one another? no. There are plenty of cat and dogs that get along. There are dogs who like cats and dogs that hate cats and vis versa and it has to do with their life experiences not their biology.

What he thinks of as “human nature” is not natural it is a product of a distinct environment. Environments change and the societal norms they produce change along with them.

If the strong are supposed to survive over the weak, why do corporations need constant bailouts from our politicians? Using the public treasury to save a dying corporation is not optimal, and yet in capitalism, this happens often. The societal structure is what permits us to survive, including the survival of businesses or people. Human beings are not innately selfish, nor are we the opposite, innately benevolent. The conditions of production determine human nature. If human beings were selfish, why do families protect each other? Is it selfish because the parents see themselves in their kids and want a better life for them in order to continue the bloodline? But not all families act as such since many parents abuse their children without any regard toward the kids’ future. Our economic system produces these families, and today, that would be capitalism. Human nature, it is sometimes said, is all about selfishness, based on the sexual reproduction of the species. Not quite. It does not explain the fluidity of sexuality. Why do gay or asexual people exist? And how do they exist? The idea that human life is simply to survive and to sexually reproduce is evidently false. Humanity exists through systems. Systems that provide for our survival, which we then want to reproduce. Capitalism is such a system, and so is the family. If humans are selfish and we assert that socialism is more efficient at serving human selfishness, we are misunderstanding the class struggle.

Liberals wish for a meritocracy, or at least so they claim. Not everyone is born equal. That’s true, but mainly because we are born in different material conditions. For example, a person born in a wealthy family. Such equality would require the abolition of money and private property. Socialism eventually aims at such equality, once the means of production are easily reproduced and improved with ease, thus rendering private property useless.

However, therein lies a problem. Even through socialism and all the way to communism, inequality exists. How can we explain the existence of so-called low ambitious people? Why are some people scientists while others are janitors? Until we achieve a communist system, this question will remain, and many will answer with a biological explanation.

Let’s return to the system of the family. Parents don’t have an unbreakable, or I should say, observable, link towards their children. Nothing connects the parents to the children in an immutable, concrete way. Society expects them to act as parents; the children need them for survival. The family system is a connection, and this is considered immutable, concrete. Insofar as it is considered to be the optimal choice for raising children. Similarly, capitalism is viewed as the optimal choice for the management of our society.

In the workplace, the boss is a dictator, much like the father of a family, and sometimes, he even declares the business to be one big family. He is correct. The relationship between children and their father is akin to the workers depending on their boss for survival. However, it is systems, not individuals, that permit us to survive.

Human beings are selfish when it comes to survival. The same goes for economic classes. The proletariat is selfish as a class. And on a higher plane, the human race is selfish as one species. Here, the human race is defined as one. But the whole makes the thing. Capitalism or socialism makes a significant difference in the solidarity found within the species; for example, the way the US or China reacted to covid.

Therefore, the only answer we can currently give on the question of human selfishness is that the workers, as a class, are surviving but dying. Selfish and yet organizing.

This friend sounds like they will definitely fall for the Darwinist theories that are undeniably pseudoscientific and dogmatic.

Where’s the question?