Help!
Roughly half the times I take Meredith for a walk, I find at least one worm struggling during its cross-sidewalk migration. It’s common for these worms to appear in bad sorts, dehydrated and less than naturally flexible. I take some small amount of pride in bending down, grasping a wiggler between thumb and forefinger, and placing it on one side or the other of the sidewalk. I consider it a small contribution to nature to use my view from on high for the benefit of these creatures. But am I helping the population of worms?
I don’t particularly care to walk along the sidewalk and see all the dead worms I find. These deaths seem the results of special ignorance and the encroaching of human technology into the ecosystem to which the worms were adapted. To whatever degree that I’m able, then, I help mitigate the effects of each.
Like it or not, though, those sidewalks or their future analogues are likely to be longstanding evidence of the aggregate will of human industry. The worms might as well get used to it. They won’t need to, though, if someone with a self-serving goodwill (I’d contend that that’s redundant; but I specify for clarity) continually obviates that need, that motivation to adapt to this changed environment. To that end, maybe it is to the betterment of the local worm populations that so many citizens of such die: it leaves the remaining gene pool arguably stronger and better able to engender adaptation(s) for survival in the long term.
Does this, then, mean that the helping hand may be injurious instead? Is there, or should there be, a Prime Directive detailing this sort of interspecies interaction? Or is that a perversion of Darwinism which does injury to the impulse to offer aid?
Even if you don’t care about the plight of worms, this is a question easily generalized to contexts in which you’re likely to have a vested interest: when do foreign powers step into the affairs of other countries; when do the “authorities” insinuate themselves into family affairs; and how much affect of nonnative sociology upon indigenous cultures is too much? These questions, or their like, face citizens around the world as I type this. This isn’t idle navel-gazing.
I’m tempted to consider the framing of this question bent. It doesn’t consider the will to help—whatever you might say of the illusion or reality of altruism—as being itself an adaptive trait. Doing so complicates the matter quite a bit, but that might be unavoidable in any serious consideration.
I know the topic has been discussed in some contexts; but I’m curious to hear both of some of those contexts and their references, as well as the lay opinion. .
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