Behold The Man*

On Human Nature

In 'The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature', Matt Ridley argues persuasively for a genetic dimension to human nature, rather than it being entirely cultural.

Ridley writes "a psychiatrist can make all kinds of basic assumptions when a patient lies down on a couch. He can assume that the patient knows what it means to love, to envy, to trust, to think, to speak, to fear, to smile, to bargain, to covet, to dream, to remember, to sing, to quarrel, to lie".*

When New Guinea tribes were encountered who had been cut off from the outside world and were unaware of its existence, they were found to smile as unambiguously as any Westerner, despite it being 100,000 years since they shared a common ancestor.

Ridley continues "I am not saying, like those that cry, 'You can't change human nature, you know', that it is futile to try to outlaw, say, racial persecution because it is in human nature. Laws against racism do have an effect because one of the more appealing aspects of human nature is that people calculate the consequences of their actions: but I am saying that even after a thousand years of strictly enforced laws** against racism, we will not one day suddenly be able to declare the problem of racism solved and abolish the laws secure that racial prejudice is a thing of the past."

I am less persuaded by his understanding of the biblical myth of the Garden of Eden. In this myth, man is expelled from the garden for eating from 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil'. An earlier Mesopotamian myth is of a primitive king, a primordial man, who is placed in a garden to guard (care for?) a 'Tree of Life'. In the biblical myth, in an echo of the original, an angel with a flaming sword guards the way back to the Tree of Life.

In the 'The Red Queen' the 'forbidden fruit' that mankind ate is said to be a euphemism for carnal knowledge. The Bible myth, I would suggest, is instead an attempt to explain*** how a world (or rather human nature) said to be have been created good could have come to be the 'fallen' way it is. This seems not to have been a concern of the Mesopotamian myth.

In my poem 'The Sentinel' the 'river that flows out of the garden (of instincts)' by 'whose banks they must always remain' is an acknowledgment that instincts are important.
(https://www.wattpad.com/165524774-poems-of-youth-and-age-the-sentinel)

But to live purely by instincts (as other animals most nearly do) would make us less than human. We might say that we still live too much by instincts and that 'that is the problem'. But would we say the same of the other animals?

Without human beings 'life in the Eden of instincts' could 'in nature a balance maintain'; with human beings 'the tree of life in the garden' could 'then have been torn apart.'

*  These (love, envy, trust, etc) are all things shared to some extent by other animals, especially by other primates. It is their particular form that is distinctively human. Even thinking is instinctive, but the content of our thinking is much more than instinct.
**  For Paul, the formative theologian of the early Christian church, the starting point of his thinking is the inability of the Jewish Law (the Torah) to deal with the roots of human behaviour. "For the good that I would I do not: but the evil that I would not, that I do." (Romans Ch7, vs19) The law teaches and constrains but cannot cure. I once remarked to university colleagues that "A nation lives by its principles more than by its laws. If its principles are good, bad laws will be changed. If its principles are bad, even good laws will not save it." In discussing all this over a meal out with my son we spoke of there being an evolution in religion as well as in nature; an evolution there from law to love. Thus in the context of 'walking by the Spirit' Paul writes, 'For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: "Love your neighbour as yourself".' (Galatians Ch5:v14)
*** Without a knowledge of good and evil, we (like the other animals) would seek no explanation. It is interesting that the temptation to eat the forbidden fruit was that 'you will be like God, knowing good and evil'; for without that ability we would be incapable of responding to God, who seeks a relationship with us. (Genesis Ch3:vs4)