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Thus, we can say that the values are both individual as well as community based. Even, cross-cultural expressions of the human values are found across all cultures and societies, though we may have variations and different emphases depending on the society we were born in and the experiences we’ve had in life.

Now we know as what these values mean. Now we will focus on from where they come from. In the earliest days of homo sapiens, a centrifugal force caused humans to spread, slowly, over the earth. They developed highly resourceful ways of coping with the extreme variations. Later, as the groups increased in size and individuals started to specialize, factors of integration and inter-dependence became paramount. Individuals had to learn to accept more fully the idea that responsibility to the group must sometimes over-ride their personal self-interest.

This is a value, which to a material extent, seems to be in jeopardy today. For many millennia, the values suitable for the family unit and the tribe were all that mattered. Then (it seems somewhere around 10,000 years ago) came the earliest civilizations of which we have any real evidence. This led to the recording in the written form of knowledge involving more complex and sophisticated set of values, thus, encouraging and facilitating more complex interactions and enabling the group, and the culture to be maintained against the challenges, both human and natural, they faced. It is worth recording that the earliest statement I have so far found comes from about 2000 BC. The deterministic and indeterministic principles that scientists have discovered that govern the natural world are impersonal.

The purely natural evolution process is ultimately a result of impersonal random processes as explained by the leading evolutionist Richard Dawkins. "All appearances to the contrary, the only watch-maker in nature are the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. It can be said to play the role of the blind watch-maker."

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* Gaurav Goel is a student of Masters in Human Resources & Organisational Development (MHROD) at Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University.