To explain Gandhi, and altruistic behavior in general beyond what makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, I would say that we have taken the tools that evolution gave us for very different things (including friendship, love, empathy, and so on) and fundamentally re-purposed them. Our brain, our hardware, is a product of evolution, but our brain has been shown to be very highly plastic and flexible, especially when we are young. Our culture, or education, and our upbringing is a big part of the software we are running on our brain and, to a large extent, we write our own software; not individually, necessarily, but on a cultural level over time.
We have spent a great deal of time and energy over the millennium to try to re-write our cultural software in ways to encourage altruism and good behavior from all. We spend a lot of time trying to instil this in our children, in each other, and in ourselves. Is it really a surprise if we have to some extent succeeded? If you spend a lot of time and energy doing a certain type of thinking, then that part of your brain will tend to develop more connections and become more developed, that has been proven experimentally.
To explain Gandhi, and altruistic behavior in general beyond what makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, I would say that we have taken the tools that evolution gave us for very different things (including friendship, love, empathy, and so on) and fundamentally re-purposed them. Our brain, our hardware, is a product of evolution, but our brain has been shown to be very highly plastic and flexible, especially when we are young. Our culture, or education, and our upbringing is a big part of the software we are running on our brain and, to a large extent, we write our own software; not individually, necessarily, but on a cultural level over time.
We have spent a great deal of time and energy over the millennium to try to re-write our cultural software in ways to encourage altruism and good behavior from all. We spend a lot of time trying to instil this in our children, in each other, and in ourselves. Is it really a surprise if we have to some extent succeeded? If you spend a lot of time and energy doing a certain type of thinking, then that part of your brain will tend to develop more connections and become more developed, that has been proven experimentally.