Post
by Speaker to Animals » Sat Dec 31, 2016 5:53 pm
If we are incapable of altruism, then I fail to see why or how we could create societies around the concept.
I think it's a relatively new genetic adaptation, possibly dating back only tens of thousands of years. But it's there, just as we are domesticated. It likely will continue dominate humanity as the domestication process continues.
The first adaptation we developed was reciprocal altruism, which conferred a great survival advantage to a kin group. Somehow we transcended that independently in various regions around fifteen thousand years ago and complex societies began to emerge as a result. We can now trust strangers, care about strangers, etc. Nicholas Wade gives several researchers' theories on how it transcended simple reciprocal altruism in his book Beyond the Dawn (highly recommended).
I have begun to believe most of the human condition results from genetically-determined behavior. Even very subtle genetic adaptations can have tremendous impacts on the character of the civilization created and populated by the people with those adaptations.
Culture drives human evolution as well. China created an actual state thousands of years ago (long before us Europeans did so). The bureaucracy of that state was one of the few avenues for advancement, was open to all, ran as a meritocracy, and your admission to those positions depended upon written and oral examination relying heavily on rote memory and recitation of official dogma and arguments. The result after thousands of years of this was that people who were predisposed to extreme conformity, and people with higher intellects, succeeded over their counterparts. The more successful members of society were able to reproduce more children, and thus the arc of the development of the Han people was determined in part by culture.
Altruism in the West has operated in a similar way, though the mechanisms for it's reproductive advantage are not as easily explained. At the kin level, altruism confers immense selective advantage. A kin group with a higher predisposition of kin altruism enjoys enormous advantages in that a single member is willing to sacrifice for the entire clan, who share most of his genetics (including the alleles giving rise to the altruistic behavior).
When you get to a complex society like those of western civilization, the more generalized form of altruism confers benefits to all of society, which increases reproductive rates and life expectancy. Groups like the Knights Hospitaler or Franciscans devoted themselves to establishing hospitals and serving society, which saved many lives and helped others to continue living and reproducing. At least some of the resulting children also shared the alleles for this kind of behavior. It's not as strong as the selective advantages in kin altruism, but it still exists at a racial level.
I think the trajectory of this adaptation is global. People already have begun to transcend even societal altruism to create something global. Two thousand years of Christian orthodoxy likely played a huge role in this development. The future I think will involve an even more generalized altruism regarding the entire species as a whole and the planet on which we live (which we already see developing). Here I don't mean the ideological nonsense of the greens, but genuine concern by people for the future of mankind itself and of our planet. If you went back even a century, such notions would have been inconceivable, even though rationally most people could well see the need for it.
My wife and I are parsing this out right now. My wife can't recall a time for her either but I can remember fooling myself into thinking otherwise. But considering it further I saw that it was bullshit.
