Gerhard Adam

It is often envisioned that humans could return to a simpler, more rural way of life and thereby live a more environmentally friendly existence. This is not only unrealistic, but in examining the numbers it becomes clear just what a predicament our human population growth has put us in.First let’s consider the raw numbers regarding human impact on the planet and see where that leaves us. There are about 57,500,000 square miles of land available on the entire surface of the earth. There are also about 6,671,226,000 people on the planet as of July 2007. A simple calculation shows that this results in about 116 people per square mile on the entire surface of the earth.

In exploring some of the biological issues surrounding selfishness and altruism, invariably the philosophical issue of selfishness surfaces. Ayn Rand has argued that selfishness is a virtue because it is the rational and principled concern with one’s own well-being and is necessary to lead a healthy, purposeful, and fulfilling life. It isn’t my intent to deal with Ayn Rand, but rather to examine the sense that many people have regarding these concepts.The only problem with Ayn Rand’s definition is that the meaning of “selfishness” was manipulated to become “self-interest”. According to the dictionary definition, “selfishness” is “extreme or exclusive self-interest” which is also the commonly understood form of the word.

In the previous post we introduced the idea that indifference was the primary action at work at the biochemical and cellular levels. At this level, it would be hard to express any survival strategy beyond probabilistic, since reproduction is asexual with those cells that have the proper attributes, being able to dominate an environment in a short period of time. Similarly, it is also an environment that is subject to genetic “plagiarism” whereby novel combinations or sources of genetic information may be acquired directly through mechanisms like conjugation. The process of conjugation results in the transfer of genetic materials from a donor cell to that of the recipient.