Compassion

I swear, I did not mean to write an essay.  I actually have an actual English essay I should be writing.  Instead, I'm writing some science shit.  Maybe I'll try spiffying it up later and seeing if my Bio teacher would give me some extra credit points on it.

Today, as I was walking home from school, I witnessed a not-too-extraordinary event.  A little black dog, all sleek and skinny and seemed to be about knee-height or something, ran onto the street.  That wasn't too remarkable, considering that we're in a suburb, so animals do shit like that from time to time.  However, these two girls suddenly ran onto the streets after the dog.

Anyways, that event made me think.    It made me wonder about the compassionate nature of humans and the effect of efficient transportation on these certain genetics.




Evidence of modernization affecting age-old genes coded for survival has already been unearthed.  For example, the act of being nervous or anxious is caused by Fight-or-Flight, a mechanism that assisted our ancestors in confrontations with danger, in which they can engage combat, and hopefully bring home some meat for the tribe, or run like hell out of there.  Nowadays, the mechanism continues to resurface when humans are faced with danger, the problem being that modern society chipped at physical issues in the world and instead piled on mental and emotional troubles, caused worse by the very symptoms meant to help.

In a similar vein, compassion is also a genetic mechanism meant to aide survival.  Organisms are, by nature, "programmed" to be helpful those within their species during opportune moments in order to ensure the passing of the species' genes.  Some species form symbiotic relations that cause them to assist each other in the name of survival.  However, for the most part, the majority of organisms care only for themselves and, at times, members of their own species.

Certain organisms within certain species, such as humans and dogs, have a special kind of compassion that extends to more than a few species outside of their own.  Both humans and dogs have shown again and again an overwhelming sense of kindness that cause them to even risk their own lives for others.

For dogs, I can kind of understand.  This compassion stems from loyalty.  After having to live with certain people or cats or dogs or mice or rabbits or whatever lives in your house, they (Probably. In good cases.) begin to tolerate each other, and eventually end up caring about each other, to the point of being willing to risk a life for each other.  Those members of that household had become a non-related family, and therefore have breached the idea of species to include each other as "their own kind".

For humans, this is a bit more complicated.  A lot of humans have an overwhelming desire to help just about everyone and everything on this freaking planet, whether plausible or not.  This has caused a lot of weird things to happen against nature, such as vegetarianism, in which humans decide to not each meat despite being built by nature with the teeth to cut through meat.

The only thing I can think of to be the cause for humans is that humankind has grown and expanded to the point where we view ourselves as superior to all other organisms on this planet, therefore calling them "animals" and "plants" and such despite us all needing to breathe and eat and being made of the same molecules and shit.  Therefore, a lot of our kindness stems from pity.  We feel bad for those below us because they lack the control we have.  We can now control a lot of things, from the foods we eat (even if they're not in season) to where we live.  Animals and plants lack that, and therefore, when they suffer, we feel bad for them because they cannot do as much as we can to help their situation.

The other thing is that a lot of problems affecting animals and plants are caused by humans, and so we feel guilty for being bastards.  After all, if there weren't cars, then we wouldn't have to worry about the dog.  If the girl had put a leash and collar on the dog, it wouldn't be running on the streets.