How could evolution permit a gene to propagate within a species that is truly altruistic- meaning that it causes its owner to do things for others that has absolutely no benefit to itself whatsoever? If someone helped others at a cost to themselves but no benefit to themselves, wouldn’t natural selection select against them?
I realize that people can be ‘altruistic’ toward their blood relatives, but this is only because they share genes with them, so in effect this is really just certain genes helping themselves out. I also know a lot of people behave in what appears to be an altruistic manner, but then again they could be displaying this type of behavior for selfish reasons- namely, to outwardly appear kind and compassionate. Could this be why people who do these supposedly selfless acts are so quick to tell everyone about it?
Someone with more info on this may show up, but I remember reading in Discover some time ago that occasional altruism is a successful strategy, sometimes better than “tough but fair,” the strategy wherein you treat others the way they’ve treated you. Because if you’re in a group, at least some of whom retailiate for mean behavior, treating someone well for no reason can get you a return favor.
Also (and this part is just thinking out loud), if you’re in a tribal grouping which is made up of a lot of relatives, the evolutionary loss of an interaction whereby you lose some chance at survival while another gains it is mitigated if that other person shares a lot of your genes.
There is always a strange question with altruism: is it really altruism or coersion?
For example, you might say that the skin cells in your fingers are acting altruistically when they are scraped off and killed as you climb a tree. But then again, they didn’t have much choice since your nerve impulses were telling them to do it. But then again, your pain receptors were not powerful enough to keep you from climbing the tree, so perhaps they were altruistic.
Similarly, if an old man throws himself in front of a car to save a little girl you can ask what motivated the old man to do it. Did he really have a choice? Most heros say they just see what needs to be done and they do it without thinking about the consequences. Is it altruism or coersion? Bistanders will be disturbed by the death of the old man, but also they will see the act as intrinsically good, and will be glad he died to save the little girl.
Certainly it is evolutionarily advantageous to have altruistic skin cells. They have evolved to be readily replaced with scar tissue. They are meant to be scraped off and to die for the benefit of other more expensive cells. Really, similarly, the death of the old man is less expensive than the little girl. Whether it is altruism or coersion or collectivism, it really doesn’t matter. It is evolutionarily beneficial. The little girl’s great grand son may throw himself in front of a car to save another little girl.
The theory of evolution is about adaptation. Survival of a species depends upon enough well adapted offspring to keep the species going. So if an individual of a species who is past the age where offspring are possible, or will be viable if born, altruistically to its own detriment saves a young person of offspring bearing capability the species is better off.
There are four possible cases:
old saving young - beneficial
old saving old - neutral
young saving young - neutral
young saving old - harmful
If all the cases are equally likely it looks like a wash, but are the cases equally likely? I don’t think so. At least in the case of most animals in the wild, the parents will make a serious effort to save their young at some danger to themselves. I never heard of a case of young attempting to save the parents. Any animal behaviorists around to comment?
I once ran across an intriguing (to this layman) article on a related subject, why we take risks. One guy thinks that altruism is still all about the booty:
However, I notice the article doesn’t explain why people dive on hand grenades, so don’t take it as anything other than another perspective.
David Simmons, I tend to side with the school (see Dawkins, as mentioned above) that natural selection occurs at the molecular level (the “Selfish Gene”) rather than the species level, so I’m not sure your argument is relevant here.
That could very well be true because I am miles from an expert. However, aren’t individual species the vehicle by which the “selfish genes” accomplish their survival at the molecular level? I.e. species are the outward expression of differing genes so aren’t they more or less the same thing?
Actually, natural selection acts at the organismal level, not the species nor the molecular level. While there are forms of selection which act at those levels, they are not Darwinian natural selection.
Well, this is probably a spontaneous response to adrenaline. However, from a group point of view it is survival positive. Better one individual be blown to bits than let the grenade explode freely in the group thereby killing and wounding many, maybe even including the guy who could have fallen on it but didn’t.
Suppose that a “society” lets its members survive under conditions where individuals would die. In that case, evolution would select for individuals having society-building behavior, and the members of a society would accept new unrelated members in order to make the society bigger and/or more robust.
A society is like an animal composed of UNRELATED cells. All the cells benefit from being members, but each has a (small) chance of suffering harm in order to defend the “virtual animal.” Yet if ALL the cells decided to cheat, chickening out whenever the slightest “heroism” is called for, then the “virtual animal” has no benefits over groups of selfish individuals.
“Virtual animals” or societies require either sophisticated brains, or they require genetic relatedness. Where there are no brains, we can have “societies” made of related cells which form animals, or made of related creatures which form hives. But where sophisticated brains DO exist, we can have groups of unrelated individuals which decide to come together to form societies, where they behave AS IF they all came from the same egg cell.
It’s pretty obvious that society-building instincts would include some feedback mechanism to keep the society alive. Our hatred of overly-selfish behavior has an obvious cause. It’s OK if all members are just selfish enough to make a good living, but if all members were so selfish that they started harming their neighbors, the “virtual animal” would die. Theft, rape, dishonesty, etc. must be kept to a minimum in the same way that damaged rogue cells in a real animal must be kept to a minimum.
I’ve always wondered about slime-molds. They live as individual amoebas for part of their cycle. When they come together to form a crawling glob and later a spore package, DO THEY ACCEPT STRANGERS? Or are the amoebas programmed to only seek out a group of relatives?
A country full of sheperds riding horses and using trained sheepdogs to tend their flocks is a “virtual animal” made from separate species. All the members are united through bonds of trust and mutual benefit. Cooperators beat competitors. The cooperating group is so successful that it even sweeps across the entire world, nearly wiping out all the wolf packs and wild horses and uncivilized humans and individual grass-eaters.
Is it based on altruism? Not really. It’s based on “reciprocal altruism”, otherwise known as cooperation.
It’s not “I’ll scratch your back IF you scratch mine.” Instead it’s "I’m programmed to scratch all my neighbors’ backs, and my neighbors are the same… and if we detect a defective member, a non-back-scratcher in our midst, this triggers a stereotype behavior called “public hanging in the town square at noon tomorrow.”
