Helping
While there are sometimes fairly obvious evolutionary rationales for helping each other (supporting others in our community might strengthen said community, which in turn makes us safer, for instance), we haven’t been able to say with any authority where this common drive to help others comes from.
It’s long been speculated that this drive might be an offshoot of the biological impulse to take care of our offspring. These reward systems and other neurological nudges already exist to support our procreationary processes and help our kids survive to adulthood, so it makes sense they might be repurposed to orient us toward helping other adults, not just our kids, when it seems like those other adults might need a hand.
A recent study supports this speculation, providing evidence that things like empathy and social motivation (the drive to form and maintain all sorts of social bonds with non-family human beings) arise, at least partially, in the medial preoptic area (MPOA), which is a part of the brain that’s already known to play a role in parenting.
The researchers behind this study found that mice that had neurons in this part of their brain (which were active while they took care of their offspring) silenced in the presence of an unrelated, stressed adult mouse, were less likely to engage in helping behaviors toward that stressed adult.
