Guybrush

Well, I guess it's time to don your cynics cap or at least leave your preconceived notions of morality behind for a moment and consider how you stand to gain from being nice to others. There are a few ways and probably more than I remember.

A big one is kin selection. This is kindness for your immediate family. The mechanism behind kin selection is the sharing of genes. A gene can be inside you. In order to perpetuate itself into the future, it also needs to be inside your child. But that's also not enough. That child has to survive until it can have children of its own and preferably a bit longer. But it's not just in your own kids. Your genes may also exist inside your siblings and inside their kids.

If a gene can affect your behaviour in such a way that it makes you ensure the future survival of their copies, then that's a competitive advantage that will evolve. You share genes with your family, the closer the better. So, in short, kin selection has equipped you with a special care for kin. It's come about by evolution through natural selection.


Then there's basic reciprocality, I pick your louse and you pick mine. From a selfish perspective, other people are potential resources. If you work together, you may both benefit. We call such relationships mutualistic if both or all partners in the relationship stand to gain.

Sometimes, there are asymmetries at play. Consider someone starving when you have a lot of food. The cost for you to give up a little food is relatively small compared to the gain that they get, which might be life saving. Maybe they now owe you or at least would reciprocate in a same manner in the future if the situation is reversed. Such asymmetries may make seemingly selfless acts even more selfishly lucrative.

Relationships can potentially be exploited. Safeguards may include being able to identify someone who will cooperate beforehand or a have a memory of previous interactions. We generally see people as potential cooperators or as competitors - which promotes an us and them mentality (which is something else society should try to prevent / break down).

Some earlier evolutionary biologists have described interactions between organisms as repeated games of prisoner's dilemma. Contests were held where they pitched different programs playing prisoner's dilemma against each other. Something interesting that came out of that was the discovery of a strategy now called tit for tat. Playing tit for tat, the player (or organism) will first cooperate, then subsequently replicate the opponent's previous action. Despite its simplicity, it's an astoundingly effective strategy for maximizing gains and tit for tat behaviours (or similar) are thought to have evolved and help explain the seeming altruism you may find in populations. Animals playing tit for tat will tend to cooperate, but will also create an environment (along with exploitation safeguards) where would-be exploiters will have reduced fitness.

I write seeming altruism because it hinges on reciprocality. If you lose more than you gain, that's not a winning strategy and would stand to lose (get weeded out) in the long run. Real, unbridled altruism of the kind where you lose fitness while others gain may of course appear, but it's going to have natural selection working against it. When it exists, it is more as a fluke.


As to why some people are altruistic in the true sense of the word, I have a few suggestions.

• Consider a grandma that protects her grand children from a bear, but ends up dying. We may think this is kin selection. Grandma can't make more children, but she can care for her genes that are inside her grand children. However, dying for it may seem a little excessive. What we can also recognize is that grandma couldn't know she would get killed. It may have been a gamble that she lost. Organisms don't always make the right bets.

• Consider a man that sees a starving child on TV and sends money to UNICEF. The child can't reciprocate, so this seems like altruism. What you can also consider then is that our genes didn't evolve in an environment with TVs and remote images. During their evolutionary history, seeing a starving child or person meant you had to stand pretty close. If societies were small, perhaps chances are you'd also be related. Maybe it's a misguided example of reciprocal altruism.

• Consider the person who adopts others children. Not everyone is going to have an optimal level of selfishness. In fact, it's more likely to be rare, plus the environment and the optimum is always changing. Humans are not robots so we don't consciously do things to raise our fitness. We're motivated to make babies because sex feels good and we get hornay. We're motivated to care for our babies not by calculation, but by love. Our genes make us love our children and our friends too. It's kinda messy and not at all as precise as a machine might be. Some may have too much love, some too little. This person may have more love than what is good for him / her self-interest.

Then, of course, you have to add human psychology on top of everything which is a different topic altogether. I am definitely of the opinion that biology shapes behaviour, but not all of it.

Here's a disclaimer that I hope isn't needed, but please don't think that I think that the above is somehow right and that it should be this way. I think of it more as a somewhat sad reality that we have to make the best of. I consider true altruism to be rare and precious.

__________________
Something Completely Different