Richard Dawkins On BeliefNet

This particular question and answer got me thinking about a concept I had come up with a while back:

How would you respond to people who say the most interesting or worthwhile aspect of human beings is behavior that natural selection would not promote? I'm thinking of behavior like adopting children who aren't family members, voluntary celibacy, or people deciding to spend their whole life praying.

Adopting children that are not your own or a close relative's is an interesting question. Why do not just humans, but other species, do what on the face of it is the wrong thing to do from a selfish gene point of view? Cuckoos play upon this and actually engineer it so that other species raise [baby cuckoos]. This is a mistake on the part of the foster parents, which have been "forced" to adopt the cuckoos.

So that’s sort of a wild analogy to adopting children, in this case ones who are not your own species.

By the way, I would hate this to be taken as any sort of suggestion that adoptive parents don’t love their adopted children; of course they do. But you could think of it as a kind of genetic mistake, in that human adults have strong parental instincts which make them long for a child. If they can’t have a child of their own, they can then satisfy those parental instincts by adopting a child.

In the same way, we have sexual instincts; we long for sex and it doesn’t matter that we use contraception. That’s, as it were, separating the natural function of sex, which is reproduction. But we still enjoy sex in the same way that we enjoy being a parent even if it is not our own child that we’re looking after.


It is the idea that we as humans, with our various technologies, have essentially removed ourselves from the evolutionary and natural selection process. Obvious, perhaps, but worth contemplating I think, because of the potential ramifications. By the combination of our manipulation of the planet and no longer being subjected to the laws of evolution, we have overpopulated the world, which is leading to its own set of consequences.

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