The Role of Hate in the Evolutionary Process
A friend asked one night how the emotion of hate affects the Evolutionary process. My immediate answer was that it has no role in the evolutionary process, only a bearing on how individual humans relate to each other during their minuscule lifespan. Thus, if I hate Honschnivel, and the hatred is so great I kill Honschinvel, the evolutionary process is not altered at all, but I may go to jail and Honschnivel is dead.
Here I want to rethink the answer and see if it leads to a different answer. I have postulated before that individuals do not affect the evolutionary process. If Lincoln had not engineered the end of slavery, then someone else would have——because slavery has a negative impact on human society and the greatest contentment for the greatest number of humans. It doesn’t make any difference really, whether witches were being burned at the stake by Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, or Jews, the evolutionary process would, by its very nature, lead to its disappearance as a justifiable part of any civilized society. It does, of course, make a difference to those who were burned at the stake.
Then again, we need take a look at mass hatred such as Hitler’s attempt to ‘purify’ the human race by killing all those groups who Hitler hated, or at the very least found inferior. We need remember that animals such as dogs have been bred to contain certain genetic traits, and yet, it seems common knowledge that the best pets personality-wise are most often the Mutts. Why is this (if it is indeed true)? Why are there so many ‘mutts’ around without lineage papers? Perhaps because Mutts are actually bred for likability. They get picked to have a home often because they are likable. I remember once picking out a cat at a pet store. There were two calico kittens, siblings, in a cage and I pulled out each one to pet. One couldn’t wait to get back in the cage and the other fought like mad not to be put back in the cage. Guess which one I bought? And that damn cat never lost her enthusiasm for being some kind of shadow of mine the rest of her life.
Easy to hate is not a likable trait. It may get one elected President but that more reflects just how many voters are really mad about all sorts of things. We obviously have a lot of people angry about widely different things, but in some broad sense, the angry voters voted for the most angry candidate. It was an anger election.
But this puts the cart before the horse. This musing is not an evaluation of Donald Trump. If a person has a tendency to easily hate for whatever reason, he/she is not likely to find a mate with the best traits to be drawn to them in any marriage arrangement. Trophy marriages are of course different. There it all depends what the trophy is. If we examine closely the rare footage of modern day humans suddenly coming into temporary contact with tribes who still live isolated in forests having had no contact with modern day humans—it isn’t just a language barrier, but they seem to have more primitive primordial emotional states. Easy to be frightened, easy to anger, easy transformation into most any emotional state. Because humans have a sizable ability to reason, have language, can write books, and so on, each generation learns a lot of social and scientific matters which contribute to progress. Even in my brief timespan in this country things have evolved a lot socially for a lot of different groups. 12 years before I was born women got the right to vote. Desegregation of schools was achieved, all sorts of legal protections were gained by children, voting rights have been more protected, the workplace is open to additional groups of citizens, gays have gotten the right to marry, modest restrictions have been placed on any religious groups who feel a need to impose their own rituals and verbal religious expressions at public meetings, schools, in the military, etc. Each time these are ‘haters’, not in the sense they go around killing anyone, but in the sense they try to block including more people with rights or opportunities once reserved only to themselves and their own ilk.
Thus, it does seem we need to consider physical changes in the human species over evolutionary time, and social changes as somewhat separate entities. It is hard to visualize what sort of physical changes are needed for the human species to survive. If the environment changes too drastically it is hard to predict which trait or traits might enable a few to survive. Our current situation is such that there is now an exponentially growing human overpopulation; this absence of responsible reproduction will come with severe consequences, but which avenue or avenues the evolutionary process will employ to correct human overpopulation is hard to predict. But no species yet has a good survival rate from overpopulation. That’s Biology 101.
It does seem hate plays a role in whether a society can remain peaceful and just. Hate leads to violence and violence begets violence. We have a front row seat for this process right before our eyes today. What is different today compared to hundreds of years ago in this country is the powerful weapons available to those who hate certain other groups of any ilk. It is not just atomic weapons, but smart missiles, drones, biological weapons, non uniformed enemies, well armed citizens, land mines, suicide bombers, endless opportunities to kill people at random (terrorism), and so on. In the past citizens mostly had to be worried about armies, the police, and the lack of human rights for all groups.
When I was young it was unthinkable to go into a school and mow down as many kids as possible before being shot yourself. This mowing down innocent people is becoming almost a daily headline. The latest of course is simply driving your car into a bunch of people. Behind all these activities is a degree of hate toward certain groups of political, religious, racial, cultural, and economic class divisions. In this sense, hate is going to play a role in the future. With all these modern ways for practically anyone or any group to commit terroristic acts, all the modern technology in the world cannot prevent it. Thus, for the human species to continue to exist in a manner those of us who are affluent live today, this ability to hate has to become evolutionarily extinct. Is this possible? Only the Shadow knows.
We could focus on any past evolutionary situation in which something has to give or species start to become extinct right and left. In general, certain species do adapt, by chance, in time to survive, and sometimes there is no adaptation soon enough for that species to survive. I reckon, in this sense, hate is a human genetic trait that has to be weeded out one way or another or humans can no longer exist together in social groups.
At this point I guess I have changed my mind. Hate does have immediate affects on individual human interactions which are of no importance to the evolutionary process. But hate also has a social component which can have a bearing on the future of our own species, something like our greed has had on other animal species. Humans have created the 6th evolutionary period in which massive extinctions of species is occurring. These other species are becoming extinct not because we hate them but because we have overpopulated the planet. This failure of responsible reproduction is not a product of hate. However, the level of hate in any overpopulated species will rise as individuals of the endangered species are forced to eliminate other members if they are to survive.
The question my friend raised was probably directed as to what advantage hate gives a species as an evolutionary advantage. I suppose we could say hate motivates. We ‘hated’ outhouses and pots in the house to collect excrement. So we invented plumbing and indoor toilets. That’s a good. Those who hated slavery were motivated enough to engineer the elimination of slavery at a tremendous cost of lives. That’s another good, again, unless you were one of the dead soldiers.
But, hate and overpopulation are not a good mix at all. We can see the beginnings of this right now. Survival, in the midst of species overpopulation, becomes wrapped in the tendency to hate others who are managing to grab pieces of the limited pie that we want ourselves. Reason, which in this case would be to enforce responsible reproduction on everyone, gives way to what is essentially human genocide. Others have to be gotten rid of so that we may live (have access to the pie which is limited in size). We know who the enemy is—it’s the 2% who own 90% of our nation’s wealth, or the blacks in the ghettoes, or the hispanics in the farm fields, or the Asians taking up so many spots at Universities, or those on welfare, or the gays who so suddenly have equal rights, or the unions who make products more expensive, or people with certain wrong inherited religious beliefs, or inferior races, or inferior cultures, and so on. It is never, for the vast majority of people, a case of human overpopulation, but it is the presence and actions of certain groups of people. The sudden obsession of some with ‘family values’ is nothing more than ‘hate’ (in some form or fashion) of others whose presence is hated, and so the ‘family’ circles the wagon, they stand their ground, they arm themselves, and a battle of course will at some point ensue. And as more and more people come to feel they have nothing left to lose, they will become terrorists and at least take a lot of people with them in this modern day spectacle of suicide by lottery.
Thus, it seems hate has both a personal price, and when human overpopulation exists, hate attempts to solve the overpopulation via elimination of the competition. Driving a car into a large group of people is only the beginning. Science has given us a wide assortment of ways to kill large numbers of people——atomic bombs, smart missiles. chemical weapons, biological weapons, drones, disruption of necessary services such as electricity, gas, food supplies—whatever, roving riots, land mines, assassinations, etc. In times past, hate could lead to limited levels of killing. Today, hate can lead to far more victims. And as we currently are beginning to see, once the violence begins in this or that direction, it begets more violence, and over time it becomes some sort of ‘sick’ contest in which the object is to kill more individuals than ever before. Our response to date has not been encouraging, as we simply threaten to teach those engaging in such violent actions by being even more violent in our response. To threaten people who have nothing left to lose (in their minds) that we are going to kill them and all those of the same bent, is hardly a deterrent. This is nothing less than a promise to engage the battle on their own terms. Most terrorists don’t even plan much of an escape, they simply kill as many people as they can and then wait to be killed themselves or be easily caught and thrown in prison. The race is on alright—but it is not the race we think we are in—the killing contest—but whether humans can learn to practice responsible reproduction before global human genocide occurs on a grand scale. So far, as terrorism progresses, the band just plays on. The young are overwhelmed or just oblivious, while the old simply try to hang in there, go gently down the stream until they take that final great leap into the unknown.
