Nature vs. Nurture.  These kind of debates go on all the time about so many different aspects of life.  It’s all very interesting, but a conversation I had the other day brought up what I think is probably the most interesting nature vs. nurture question I’ve contemplated.

It seems that the human race as a whole looks down on the taking of human life and in fact has a very difficult time with that particular act.  Is this something that is encoded into us before we were ever born, or is it something we have somehow learned?

The conversation got started with a discussion about how the visual cortex in the brain is unable to distinguish between real happenings and images (such as TV and movies).  Think about it for a minute… when you go to a scary movie, you cover/close your eyes or jump or catch your breath when the scary things happen.  Why?  You know you’re in a movie theatre, you know it isn’t real, but you jump anyway.  It’s because our eyes take in the scene and our brains process the images, but there’s still some lag time between what we see and how we think about what we see.  After we jump, we know it was silly, that it’s not real… but for that split second our brain didn’t know that and we were reacting (and possibly protecting ourselves).  But if we sit through the same scary movie a few times, we know what’s coming and can train ourselves not to jump.  And if we sit through enough different scary movies we can train ourselves not to jump at all… but that can also carry over into reality, where we may not "jump" (or react) when we should.  That’s the whole idea behind the disgruntled parents who don’t want kids playing violent video games, because they will get desensitized and no longer have a healthy "respect" for weapons, violence, death, etc.

Next the conversation turned to how the military actually uses interactive video "games" for training soldiers for combat.  They complete all these different "levels" where they attempt to "neutralize the enemy" and it’s thought that if they do that enough, then when the time comes for them to shoot someone in a real combat situation, it will be easier since they have been desensitized.

So that led to the question… why do we need to be desensitized?  Because humans (on the whole) feel that ending a human life is very distasteful.  Why?  Because "society" teaches us that?  But who taught society?  And what about "uncivilized" groups of people – they don’t go around killing people willy-nilly either.  Nor do we have a history of "we used to kill each other for no reason, then we decided it wasn’t good so we stopped".  There’s nothing like that.  It seems that all humans have such respect for life and there’s no clear point where we "learned" that, so it must just be part of who we are.

It also seems to be part of the animal kingdom as a whole.  Yes, animals will kill each other, but it’s never a random act.  It’s for food, or protection, or sometimes as the result of an illness – but not just for sport, not just because.  Just like humans.  When we do take a human life, it is for a reason (protection of the species, ending suffering, etc).  I am not here to argue if those reasons are just or right or valid – I’m just here to point out the fact that society has established the need to have a reason, to somehow explain why this distasteful act is allowed to happen.

Of course you can bring God / faith / religion into the conversation and it is obviously clear where ingrained values such as this stem from… but from a purely "scientific" point of view this is a very interesting question to contemplate.  One that made me think quite a bit.  I like that.