Evolutionary Altruism
 

Martin, otto and I had a rather interesting discussion last night in the IRC chat about altruism. I mentioned that altruism was a survival trait (something I remembered from college), but I had some trouble articulating my argument because I had been working on my car while conference calling a local food distributor all day (not to mention seeing The Dark Knight at the midnight showing on Thurs).

Altruism develops in many animals of higher intelligence that are more social as a sort of "I'll scratch your back" arrangement only for survivability. For some animals, living in a pack or tribe instead of on one's own vastly increases their odds of survival because the individuals can pool their respective strengths and they can team up to fight off danger. In the development of these societies, the ability to work together was of paramount importance. A pack that can work together more efficiently had a higher survivability rate. This is where altruism came in. Trust has to be developed, which means that emotions like guilt, embarrassment, an pride took center stage to help build the mutual trust between members of a pack. This trust lead to behavior that was in the interest of the whole pack even over the individual. When a soldier bravely dives on a grenade, he is doing so in order to save his friends so that they may continue on. This same behavior can be seen in many higher primates, like chimpanzees. I would certainly trust someone who did something selflessly for me, and I'd be more inclined to return the favor.

Here is some further reading:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-teo012207.php
http://www.livescience.com/animals/0..._altruism.html

Bob Trivers was the first person to describe the conditions under which reciprocal altruism should evolve. Trivers is one of the more well-known biologists in the history of evolutionary biology. His paper is:

Trivers, R. L. 1971. The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology 46:35-57.

A LOT of biological research on altruism was inspired by his paper.


He reflects on the paper 30 years later here:

Trivers, R. 2005. Reciprocal altruism: 30 years later. In C.P. van Schaik and P.M. Kappeler (eds.) Cooperation in Primates and Humans: Mechanisms and Evolution. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp 67-83.

He spends a lot more time talking about humans in the second paper.

Fantastic! I'll definitely give that a read.

Another important paper in the field:

Axelrod R. & Hamilton, W. D. 1981: The evolution of cooperation. — Science 211: 1390–1396.

Unfortunately, I can't find a pdf of it.

Finally, here's an excerpt from John Maynard Smith's book Evolution and the Theory of Games in which he discusses the evolution of altruism:

http://www.heretical.com/ess/evolcoop.html

At first, I had to ask myself if reciprocal altruism could compete with inclusive fitness. But I realized that in order to maximize reproduction in a species that has reciprocal altruism, an individual that adheres to the social norms may be more likely to reproduce. Ain't evolution somethin?

I'm not sure what you mean regarding competition between reciprocal altruism and inclusive fitness.

I was probably thinking of the colloquial term "selfish gene". Selfishness is the opposite of altruism, but the selfish gene really isn't about the same kind of selfishness as that which is discussed in reciprocal altruism.

Ok, that makes sense. In common usage, altruism and selfishness are antithetical. From an evolutionary perspective (or "selfish gene" perspective), reciprocal altruism is selfish.

Selfishness and altruism can go hand in hand. For example, a worker bee passes her genes on more effectively by aiding her sisters than she would by reproducing herself.

I'm so bad for this. I've been meaning to reply here for a while and have not gotten to it. Apologies to those who've been waiting to hear from me on this subject.

Firstly, before I go any further, I think it's important to note that biology is not my area of expertise. I don't know much about it and what I do know is chiefly confined to the sphere of arthropods, which have always fascinated me for no adequately explained reason. Interestingly, the animals aside from humans that could most easily be said to be altruistic in nature are primarily arthropods; I'm thinking particularly of eusocial colonial insects, such as bees, ants and termites.

The discussion, as noted by Willravel, evolved in the chat as an off-shoot of some other socio-political discussion, in which I asserted that there is no such thing as altruism, except as an intellectual construct.

Altruism is defined as an unselfish concern or devotion to the welfare of others. It implies to me that the altruistic individual performs an action (or actions) that are devoid of personal gain. What's interesting about this is how it contrasts with criminal psychology, which teaches that there's nearly always a motive or benefit behind an individual's actions, even if it's not readily apparent. In other words, people very rarely do something for no reason at all.

Of course, this becomes easily obfuscated. An above example is the soldier who jumps on a grenade for his comrades. Such a person seemingly has nothing to gain and everything to lose from this action, yet chooses to undertake it anyway. I've no idea how common such a thing actually is, but there's certainly enough apocryphal accounts of such heroics that we can assume that it does at least happen. I think one would need to look more deeply at the soldier's motivations. Religious and military indoctrination are of course quite high on the list.

What's interesting about humanity is how we conflict with our own instincts. We've taken socialism and technology to an extreme where in some situations we counter our own instincts. On a warm day, for example, I still choose to leave the house fully clothed. I don't particularly need or want my clothes, except that it would be socially unacceptable for me to leave without them.

I think that if we move into other animals we begin to see some more clear-cut cases. My dictionary has "behavior by an animal that is not beneficial to or may be harmful to itself but that benefits others of its species" as an alternate definition for the word altruism, and that is pretty clear cut and again with eusocial insects it's very common.

I'm not particularly interested in discussing altruism in primates or arthropods if I'm honest, precisely because it is so clear cut. What particularly interests me is altruism within humanity. I argue that humans are almost entirely selfish and small minded and there has to be a real benefit in order to break out of that thinking. Perhaps it seems pessimistic to think that way, but it's important to note also that the gain behind an action does not need to be material. Sometimes it's spiritual or emotional instead, and that's equally valid. As a child I was taught to be kind to others. Such behaviour was positively reinforced, and now I continue to get a good feeling from being kind. It's not an instinctive thing by any means; on the other hand, instincts, while powerful, are not all-controlling.

Virtue is not it's own reward, except in cases of complex social conditioning.