It feels good to be nice...

I thoroughly enjoyed Brazil’s emphatic win over Ghana. I cheered [almost loudly at midnight] at Rolando’s hoodwinking the Ghana goalkeeper Kingson to score Brazil its first goal. The explosive speed, the exquisite touch are worth marveling, but later when I lay on my sofa in darkness I couldn’t help wondering how true Darwin’s theory of Survival of Fittest is! Totally ingenious! Sure, whatever is inferior in the struggle for existence is doomed to become extinct. Whenever I sit for a semester exam, as soon as I look into the question paper, my competitors face flashes in my mind. It is this flash that instills in me the fist clenched resolve, that drive. I must admit the contest for survival is extremely severe and mutually confrontational in this case. ha ha![i'd love to see the physiognomy of sandhya when she reads this!]
Competition….!!!!

Humans and animals are genetically driven to compete for survival, thus making all social interaction “inherently” selfish, strictly in accordance to the theory of natural selection.
So, are altruism and morality artificial outgrowths of modern culture?
This leaves me inferring that even seemingly unselfish acts of altruism merely represent a species' strategy to survive and promote their interests. This presents an amusing paradigm for understanding sociality. Predominantly, theories in ethology concerning cooperative and altruistic behavior claim that social animals, including human and nonhuman primates, are cooperative and altruistic only if they have something to gain from their actions. It’s a part of our brain Chemistry. So far so good..."I’m loving it!"

But survival of the fittest is just a “part” of the story… How does one explain firefighters running into a burning building to save strangers at the possible expense of their own lives? There's no biological imperative for that. Instead of being genetically predisposed to competition and aggression, we have a biological foundation for unselfish social interaction. Now the more I think of this, the more boring it becomes. Perhaps, evolution is more about collaboration or symbiosis between organisms and species than it ever was about competition. Multicellularity, the eye, the brain, language, photosynthesis, the Archaeoptrix… I better stop listing…A study says humans derive pleasure from positive social interaction. And far from being inherently violent, humans demonstrate a natural abhorrence of violence and conflict. We have to train soldiers to kill. It's not instinctive. We are horrified by terrorism, that explains it all. Duh!

Probably “ It feels good to be nice”….shrugs a boooooored me!