Where Does Good Come From?

[mzteris]

Harvard’s Edward O. Wilson tries to upend biology, again

On a recent Monday afternoon, the distinguished Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson was at his home in Lexington, talking on the phone about the knocks he’s been taking lately from the scientific community, and paraphrasing Arthur Schopenhauer to explain his current standing in his field. “All new ideas go through three phases,” Wilson said, with some happy mischief in his voice. “They’re first ridiculed or ignored. Then they meet outrage. Then they are said to have been obvious all along.”

http://articles.boston.com/2011-04-17/bostonglobe/29428429_1_altruism-mole-rats-evolutionary-theory

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Wilson recants "kin theory" to explain altruism and publishes the math to prove it.

What do you think?

One question I have about "kin theory": How do they explain people sacrificing all of their lives to helping others who are not related and nothing "like them"? Or helping animals?




A statement I know I agree with:

“This powerful tendency we have to form groups and then have the groups compete, which is in every aspect of our social behavior…is basically the driving force that caused the origin of human behavior.”

ain't 'that jut the truth.

[InvisibleTouch]

1. I do think altruism = kin selection.

Granted, I haven't read Wilson's latest take on the subject, but humans as a species are not very old. Technology and the modern world has vastly outpaced physical and even behavioral evolution. Humans are still responding to the world as though they lived in small closely-related communities - therefore any person they see in trouble, is likely to be a close relative (at least according to the most basic instinct - whether or not it's factually true). Thus the instinct to help a stranger. I don't think it makes "heroic good deeds" any less commendable, but let's not pretend there's something extraordinary going on, when it can be well explained through biology and genetics.

A fantastic book on the lag between the modern world and human behavior is this one:

<"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684804557/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=plumedserpentpro&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399353&creativeASIN=0684804557">The Stone Age Present: How Evolution Has Shaped Modern Life - From Sex, Violence and Language to Emotions, Morals and Communities</a>

[provis99]

2. Edward Wilson is a social darwinist jerk.

He's right up there with Herbert Spencer in the list of social darwinist pseudo-scientists.

[Jim__]

3. If what Wilson says about altruism across insect species is true, then it would at least be more ...

... complex than just "kin selection":

Wilson made Hamilton’s theory the basis of his work in sociobiology, a field he pioneered in the 1970s and which cemented his status as a star beyond the realm of entomology. But over the course of subsequent decades, Wilson came across evidence that made him doubt the connection between genetic relatedness and altruism. Researchers were finding species of insects that shared a lot of genetic material with each other but didn’t behave altruistically, and other species that shared little and did. “Nothing we were finding connected with kin selection,” Wilson said. “I knew that something was going wrong — there was a smell to it.”

[Boojatta]

4. If a married individual isn't in an arranged marriage, but selected his or her spouse ...

then some selection of kin took place. Of course, we need to distinguish between the ordinary language concept of selecting kin and the technical terminology "kin selection."

In selecting a spouse, some people consider personal integrity to be significantly more important than ancestry. In that case, a collection of people each of whom is single and marriage-worthy might be a more important in-group than the ethnic group or groups that the two married people belong to.

Arguably, for practical purposes what matters is the collection of people who will in future be simultaneously marriage-worthy and not married, especially if loss of spouse through divorce or death seems a likely enough possible event that one wants to be able to cope with such an event.