A Question About Karma

So, a friend of mine posted this a while ago on FB and I thought this was an excellent topic for discussion. I was saving it for when I had a little more time to devote to discussion, but that's going to be a little while yet so I'm gonna go ahead and toss it out here because it's too good a subject to leave sitting around. Let me hear your thoughts!

Here's a question about karma...
If a bad deed gets 'punished' (the person who did wrong,gets 'repaid' by some horrific event, say...) , but people keep doing bad things, does that mean pretty soon, all we get is bad breeding bad, creating evil? Because no one is perfect here, and the cycle seems to be that things are getting worse. Is this why?

I've not had the opportunity yet to study philosophy and religions really in depth, but here's what I think I know from a biological/evolutionary stand point.

Individual human beings are selfish at the primal level. It's instinct to think of ourselves first when taking care of our basic needs (food, shelter, protection from predators, etc). As we evolved, we have steadily grown into a more altruistic model of behavior because those who work as a group have had a better chance of survival than one who goes it alone. However, there are always those who try to "cheat" and benefit from the group without sacrificing personally. What's really cool is that even this behavior is selected against - they may win for a short period of time, but lose in the long-run.

Let's take for example, those drivers who race up a lane to a merge point in order to cut in front of a long line of cars who've already merged together to form a line in the lane that continues, thus saving themselves a few precious minutes of drive time. This seriously ticks everyone off who believes they fairly merged and waited patiently their turn in the group. Now, as I used to drive Hwy 285 home and witness this happening every night, I would pay attention to who did it so if I saw that vehicle again near the merge, I'd be able to block their way and prevent them from being unfair again if I so chose (I didn't, but I saw many others who did do that, and I can't say that I saw the same vehicles behaving that way every night so for many I wouldn't say it was a habitual behavior). Or, I'd wait and see if they'd incite someone to a rage that made them run that person off the road, or they lost control because it was icy out and they were driving in an unsafe manner (as Hippie Love Fest put it, living with the consequences of their actions). That is the "punishment", or behavior being selected against. Either by policing by fellow members of the group, or by their selfish actions causing an outcome that was more likely (crashing) due to their risky behavior. (btw, this wouldn't be an example if we all followed CDOT's recommendations for how to behave at a merge point - it creates a condition in which this selfish behavior is minimized and the altriustic behavior of the group reinforced, thus lowering risk to the group of a bad outcome)

So while I believe that "karma" may indeed exist and is, as homeagain put it, a balancing of energy, I don't believe that we humans as a whole are getting more "bad" as my friend perceived (otis, I LOVE that you asked the question: "Define 'bad'?" - you're thinking like a scientist right there! ). It is a cycle of people being selfish until they are selected against, ie "punished" and society as a whole bouncing back. I do think, sadly, that we are in a period in which selfish, thoughtless, harmful behavior is strong and haven't gotten to the point where it is selected against as a whole. What I see us doing to the environment is the premier example: we use antibiotics indiscriminately, we try to fix messes the quick and half-ass way (like taking pills to lose weight without exercising concurrently), we abuse the land in mass-crop growing, and we are extremely wasteful with what we create. It's not a sustainable way of life. We will pay for it, and change our behaviors as a result, in the decades to come; far too late to mitigate the worst of the damage, but we humans need a culling, and a reminder of what's truly important, anyway.

This link has a great explanation of the thinking behind the hypotheses:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism-biological/

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the ... y-altruism