The Dodo reports a mother cat, with kittens, who happens to have adopted (and suckled) a baby squirrel. I have a feeling that I posted this before, but I realized that it bears on one of the arguments for God: the Argument from Altruism. This has been made by many, most prominently by Francis Collins, who maintains that our instinctive moral feelings (what he calls “the Moral Law”) can’t be explained by evolution. Nor can human altruism, which, in biological terms, is the sacrificing of your reproductive output for a nonrelated individual. A soldier who falls on a grenade to save his buddies could be one example.
Now of course there are biological and social explanations for such altruism. The soldier, for example, could be acting on instinctive feelings to save those familiar to him, which, in our early evolution, might be related—a type of kin selection. Or it could simply be enculturated (not divine!) compassion, which we exercise towards those we know. Soldiers are, after all, trained to regard the members of their platoon as “brothers.” In other words, such sacrifice may be highjacking our evolutionary “help our friends and relatives” detectors.
One example of such altruistic highjacking is this cat (see below) who has adopted a squirrel. That’s the ultimate form of altruism, because she’s not even helping a member of her own species, and cross-species fostering is not something that evolution could ever favor. What is likely going on is that the cat is suffused with maternal hormones like oxytocin, and the squirrel is simply riding that wave of hormones. (Human adoption, an altruistic behavior, is similar).
Here’s the video:
It’s labeled as the cat teaching the squirrel to purr, but I’m not sure that’s true. What do you think.
In fact, after I watched the movie and wrote the above, I then read the article, which makes one of my points:
So why (if you are a bird or cat or other animal…hmmm, even human) would you put time and energy into caring for another animal’s offspring? Isn’t the point to promote your own genes? It could be that the risk of not caring for a hungry face that presents itself to you is greater than the cost of doing some extra nursing or care, just in case that baby animal has some of your genetic material. Hormones may play a key role in this as well, as oxytocin produced in mother cats after kittens are born help make caregiving a priority– and this caregiving may extend to baby squirrels, if they are presented at the right time (while the mom is nursing her own babies). And we humans, well, we are very susceptible to cuteness, which could in part explain why we take pets into our homes (but that’s a topic for another time!).
In the end, though, my point is that if human altruism proves God because evolution supposedly can’t explain it, then so does this kind of cross-fostering. It can’t be explained directly by evolution, but Collins’s mistake is assuming that naturalism can’t explain it. It can, just like it can explain this cross-fostering. So, of course, my title is sarcastic, but the point is that we can see “maladaptive” behaviors in humans and other species due to the highjacking of evolved—or, in our case, also culturally inculcated—feelings and instincts. The existence of behaviors that evolution can’t directly explain is no evidence for God.