Energy Efficiency, Altruism, Philanthropy, and Evolutionary Survival:
Charles Darwin had a theory of “progressive money”. By that he meant philanthropy—rather than spending money on yourself, spending it for the benefit of people who need it more than you do.
Today, when a lot of people think of Charles Darwin, they think of so-called “social Darwinism” and “survival of the fittest” as an excuse for cutthroat capitalist imperialism. That’s because in his book The Origin of Species, he showed how genetic inheritance, genetic variation, and natural selection combine to make evolution happen. That was immediately seized upon by imperially minded people of the day as a justification for beating everyone else down. Charles Darwin spent the rest of his life trying in vain to get people to quit acting like stupid monkeys and pay attention to what he really said. People still don’t seem to be paying much attention to him, do they?
Altruism, Charles Darwin’s definition of philanthropy, and their importance, are direct products of the evolutionary mathematics of energy efficiency. The three most fundamental components of the survival instinct are physiological survival, physical safety, and social interaction. For a person whose personal survival needs are well supplied for, who has a great surplus of resources, and who uses his intellect to imagine abstract ideas, the next logical step (whether he makes it consciously or not) is to advance his own survival by sharing his resources to benefit his social community.
From the most pessimistic standpoint possible, in the modern world philanthropy is crucial to advancing one’s own evolutionary interests. If humans continue to live by their most primal instincts of survival of the fittest, and neglect to use their intellect to advance socially in spite of the fact that human intellect continues to be used to build more and more powerful weapons, eventually blind adherence to the law of survival of the fittest combined with the ever-increasing means to prevent other people’s survival will annihilate the human species.
If large numbers of people are left to die—or are killed—because supposedly they are less fit to survive than anyone else, surely most of those people will die fighting to survive. That means fighting for the resources they need to live, fighting against the people who are threatening them, and fighting by the most effective means available to them. Now that humans have devoted so much intellect to building weapons that kill other humans with ever greater efficiency, the doomed people are guaranteed to try to get hold of those weapons in order to kill their enemies as efficiently as possible. Those doomed people will continue struggling to the very last to satisfy their own instincts by the same evolutionary mathematics of energy efficiency that have always governed human behavior.