Other columns would have already taken up the social, moral, religious, political dimensions of the morality of violence, but I wanted to find out if "science," the odd man out in topics such as morality, has something to tell us about human nature. After all, it is biological evolution we all share in common and ethics seems to be something all humans share across time, cultures and religions. Anthropological evidence shows that ethics was already something our pre-historic ancestors struggled with, even before major world religions appeared and codified it to guide the behavior of their followers. Religion is not at all necessary for one to be ethical. You need only think of icons of "good" such as Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and you will know that "good" is not faith- or culture-specific. The reverse is true too; you only have to think of the worst crimes against children or humanity in general, and it straddles the divisions as well. So it makes sense to consider what the two things we seem to all share in common – our biological evolution and ethics – may have to do with one another.
Science has traditionally shied away from topics such as "morality" because even with empirical evidence, morality is messy to characterize and measure to a degree of certainty to form a theory about it based on biological evidence. But with the advent of neuroscience as well as genetics, I have found that science has become more daring in its assertions about the role of our biological and its twin-process since we are humans, our cultural evolution in our concepts of good and bad. Works by Steven Pinker, who heads the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, such as "How The Mind Works" (NY: Norton Books, 1999) as well as Harvard’s Michael Shermer, who recently wrote a book entitled "The Science of Good and Evil" (Times Books, 2004) were interesting materials to digest in terms of what science can say about "morality." The main point I have learned from both works is the opposite of the song from South Pacific. They assert that there are Jekylls and Hydes within us all. Ancient cultures telling us about the inviolable twin existence of opposites, Yin and Yang, the cosmic dance of the Hindu god Shiva, and the unmistakable cycles of the natural world – birth and death, sunshine and rain, calm and storms – should have clued us in on dual potentials that lurk within us in a continuum, not a simple "on and off" switch for good and evil but a dimmer switch. The control of the dimmer switch rests not only in our biology (nature), but also in the circumstances (nurture) we find ourselves in. That is not new to science or even to those who are keen observers of the world and human affairs but it may be new to those who believe we are all only goodness inside and that it takes only influences outside ourselves to do "bad."
Steven Pinker cited experiments where subjects were divided by a toss of a coin or something that has nothing to do with anything potentially hateful about one group or the other such as preference for a painter. What was interesting was that the two groups were instantly hostile to one another even when there was no basis for it! Humans seem to instinctively look at "others" as threats and tend to "withhold rewards from the other group even if doing so is costly to their own group." We even translate this tendency to cosmic settings. If you look at the majority of movies about "aliens" from outer space, they mostly assume these beings to be the "enemy" just because they are not from here.
Pinker also cited works by evolutionary psychologists who have said that our choices to do good or evil are dictated by the imperative of our genes to survive. While this may be scientifically neat to consider and sheds some light in terms of our connections with what we can observe in the natural world such as what Pinker enumerated, "parental investment" or "kin selection," I think it fails to capture the complex dimensions that glare at us when faced with good or evil. If I were a parent who lost a child in Beslan, and an evolutionary psychologist tries to provide me comfort by saying that the militants were just giving in to the behavioral translations of what their genes dictate to survive, I would tell him to please leave me alone before I give in to what my Hyde genes are telling me now to do to him. When I saw Hiroshima and the Holocaust Museum, and when a friend of mine told me in detail what she saw and how she was affected after visiting the Apartheid Museum in South Africa, I do not think any amount of evolutionary psychology, no matter how sparklingly justified in science, would be able to explain all the dimensions we struggle with when faced with overwhelming human tragedy. The opposite is true too. When poignant heroism such as when a child rescues other children in a fire, risking her own life, or that little girl about 20 years ago whose eyes were plucked in her sleep by her mentally sick mother but whose immediate reaction was total forgiveness, understanding and plea for her mother’s recovery, explanations of human heroism, based solely on biological or cultural evolution, particularly by children whose cultural conditioning is still in its initial stages, would come up achingly short. Like seeing an elephant in its immensity for the first time and trying to understand it only by getting a cell sample and putting it under the microscope, science remains a net that could capture only a portion of human nature. Imagine scientists coming out on CNN or BBC after a human tragedy or monumental human heroism and trying to explain it to the rest of us by saying, "It’s evolution, stupid!" It may have worked for political campaigns but I think it will backfire on science and we will find science once more "leaving us where it found us," lost within our own nature and begging the gods for the answers.