Are humans innately good or innately selfish?

That's a fundamental question when it comes to discussing morality, law, and society. If humans are innately selfish, then the only way society functions is by the majority forcing everyone to behave through tools of social control like government, religion, and culture. Without such control, the argument goes, society would disintegrate into a Darwinian anarchy where the strongest reign through force and cruelty.

In addition, this worldview lends weight to the idea that only an extra human authority — such as God — can effectively impart a moral code, for if humans are naturally immoral or amoral, they simply would not bother to develop one. In such a view, religion is not merely a tool for enforcing whatever society defines as morality; it is an essential source of morality that transcends society.

If humans are generally good, however — if they are hardwired for altruism, for example, or if our social nature makes us seek approval, and render cooperation and compromise common and successful survival strategies — then the importance of religion and tradition and government all shrink. They are still useful as founts of distilled wisdom and as a way to enable or compel group behavior, but they are not in and of themselves a necessary component of virtue.

The reality, of course, is as variable as the human experience. Like any other distribution, human behavior follows the bell curve. Even if most humans are innately good, there will be some that misbehave. If our natural state is despotic anarchy, there would still be a few selfless saps trying to help others. Throw in other considerations, like love of family or economic ties, and the picture becomes more muddied still.

That said, a couple of recent developments shed some interesting light on the subject.

Last year, molecular researchers identified what they called an altruism gene present in almost all living things. It's not a gene that makes people give to charity; it's a gene that appears to explain why some cells in a multicellular organism give up their ability to reproduce — and thus commit genetic suicide — in order to help the organism as a whole function better.

Their conclusion? The function arose for a separate purpose — letting cells shut off temporarily useless processes to conserve energy — and was then co-opted by evolution in multicell organisms, in something of a biological bait-and-switch. The resulting combination was so successful that all later organisms retained it.