Humans in the Animal Kingdom

We are selfish beings. I never thought so before reading the selfish gene, I thought we just had selfish moments, but in general, apparently we are selfish. We compete for everything, especially in our capitalist environments. Although we do share, we share with the people who we appreciate, but if a stranger comes and asks for something we might give him something, but not at all what he needs. For example, if we are asked for a couple of coins at the street we happily give them away, but what if that same person who asks for a couple of coins asked us for a couple million pesos? Would we give them to him? I personally wouldn’t. I don’t know the person well enough, and maybe we’d say “If I could afford it of course I would.” Yet we can afford things that are far more expensive than that and we couldn’t give 2 million pesos to a stranger. Then there are other people who give millions of dollars to the poor, but those are the people who make billions of dollars, to whom a couple thousand dollars mean the same as a couple of coins do to us. We also afford thousands of dollars to get our kids in college, because we want our genes to be best. We are competing with the rest of the population and we want our kids to be better than the rest, even if that means we won’t treat others well. Just as lions compete with gazelles we compete with cows, and pigs, and lambs etc. We kill them and eat them for our own benefit. However we don’t kill and eat other humans because this is a greater risk. A human would be harder to kill than a cow, and if you killed a human you would be punished severely, especially if you ate it afterwards…But if you killed a cow then it would mean nothing to the other humans. Perhaps maybe they’d want a part of the cow too, but nothing else. It surprises me how similar we are to the rest of the animal kingdom, but then, we are part of it as well, so it’s natural, although still surprising.