Peez

Fair enough. I did not mean to take you to task, but I still stand by the contention that the universality of a "moral" depends on how one defines a "moral", particularly how specific one is. No doubt the text deals with this, and I cannot claim to know very much about it. I would point out that we have evolved genes that tend to make us eat food that is nutritious (even though the food available now often seems to make a mockery of this), but that doesn't mean that every culture likes the same flavours.

Peez

Albert Cipriani

Thanks Peez,
For proving my hunch that those Medieval alchemist were correct about spontaneous generation. No sooner had Kevbo asked if there was a doctor in the house:
… and poof! You appear, a bonafide professor of Biology. Cool.

Now I can see that, thanks to evolution, Gronks no longer eat their eggs. Ergo, us humans, being Gronk descendents, don’t eat our children. Alleluia! That’s why, as all men everywhere know, before our children get tucked into bed, they recite a prayer of thanksgiving to Gronk alleles, not God.

I hope you don’t think I’m being rude. I’m only trying to stress my point that just as a god-of-the-gaps doesn’t explain anything about His creation, neither does reciprocal altruism nor kin selection explain the evolution of human altruism.

I fully accept your model. But I can’t connect the dots between our unwillingness to eat our young and our unwillingness to, for example, not eat our dead even when we’re starving to death.

I accept your model but cannot see how it leads to the altruism all of us non-sociopaths have actually felt and acted upon. You know, it’s not as if we’re discussing the THEORY of altruism. The theory of altruism, like the theory of evolution, like all theories only applies to which we do not directly experience. And we directly experience our own altruistic sentiments whether or not we act upon them.

For example, we theorize that leaf cutting ants are ACTING altruistically, that is, behaving as if they ACTUALLY WERE altruistic. Our behavioristic understanding of them does not extend to an understanding of what they are thinking (or dare I say feeling). Not so with us. We experientially -- not theoretically -- know how to be altruistic. So we mustn’t pretend that we don’t know, that the altruism we’ve all experienced may be some kind of autonomous deterministic reaction to alleles.

Here is where what you wrote seems like heresy: How can evolution have it both ways? How can it be a theory that predicts natural selection based upon competitive advantage AND a theory that predicts natural selection IN SPITE OF competitive DISADVANTAGE.

Of course a single mutant allele may be advantageous AND disadvantageous, but you’re referring to the aggregate of both when you say “the first mutant allele was mildly disadvantageous.” How is this not a contradiction of evolutionary theory? – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

caravelair

some cultures eat their relatives when they die, even if they are not starving.

if a certain gene presents a mild disadvantage that does NOT interfere significantly with one's chances for reproduction, then such a gene can be established in a population through genetic drift. natural selection is not the only mechanism driving evolution!

Happy Wonderer

I must agree with Albert here. I think that there is an anthromorphic problem; we describe the behaviour of ant colonies in terms of human experience for convenience. Calling the worker ant's behavior "altruistic" is an analogy; a convienient way describing a phenonoma without inventing even more jargon. We must not confuse analogy with correlation and recursively jump from the leaf cutter ants to human behavior.

The difference between the ant's behavior and ours is that the ant's (AFIK) is largely deterministic and ours is not. (I'm not a follower of B.F. Skinner.) I do not believe that a worker ant's strike has ever been observed; their behavior is controlled by phenoeromes emitted by the queen.

Giving a bum $10 is an altruistic behavior for humans. Giving $10 to a sci-fi bum with mind-control abilities is not an altruistic behavior.

In my opinion, the human mind evolved as both a response to and cause of our complex social behavior (which is seen in other ape species.) This complexity -- in itself -- is sufficient to explain attributes such as morality, compassion, and altruism. We have the ability to learn and pass that knowledge to the next generation. This is a mechanism entirely separate from the biological mechanism of evolution.

hw

Edit: Complexity "of itself" as sufficient to explain moral attributes is a bit strong. It is the complexity of the mind in addition to the power of human association. A child raised completely in isolation will not (in my opinion) develop a complex moral sense. Of course, we should never try such an experiment.

Edit again to include the paragraph that I was agreeing with...

Non-praying Mantis

My apologies, Albert, but I guess I should tell you that I am a biology teacher (it's in my profile)! Old habits die hard.



These were just examples of how altruistic behaviors that have genetic backing can lead to increased fitness. It seems that you know that now, no need to press that point. Again, my apologies.

But seriously, how "real" does altruism have to be for it to count?



I'm a scientist. We use "fuzzy" wording all of the time to show that our hypotheses, theories, and conclusions are all contingent on the data that we have.



Hmmm... and I thought we were discussing where morality came from, not "jump-on-a-hand-grenade" altruism! I guess we weren't clear on the definition.



You're right we don't have an empirical explanation for it, but here is a possible (note the "fuzzy" words, again) pathway:

altruism for offspring > altruism for relatives > altruism for pack/village members > altruism for people of the same nation/creed/race/etc. > altruism for all people

Now, remember that genes which lead to certain behaviors do not enforce those behaviors. Humans do not usually have "fixed action patterns" when it comes to behavior, we have "desires" and "drives" and "rewards" which make certain behaviors more likely. With the exception of the last two parts of the pathway, all of these altruistic behaviors increase genetic fitness. Genes that encode behavior however, do not always make our behaviors conform to exact stimuli. A super-stimulus is one of these problems with genetic behaviors. Here is an example of a super stimulus:

There is a species of beetle that has a yellow-brown dimpled elytra (the hard outer shell of a beetle's back). The male of the species is drawn to the appearance of a female that has a yellow-brown dimpled elytra. However, there is a certain beer bottle that has a similar color and texture (dimples) that will draw the male beetles even more powerfully! Males will attempt to mate with this bottle, thinking it is a "super-female" that will lay lots of eggs. The actual genes that lead to this behavior favor finding the normal stimulus, but not the super-stimulus.

Perhaps our "jump-on-a-hand-grenade" altruism is similar to our behavior of us responding to a super stimulus? I don't know.

However, not knowing the answer to the question automatically means that evolution could not be responsible, and therefore it obviously comes from God. Please don't treat me like a moron and offer me this platitude because of my uncertainty!



Real wolves don't act like this. They are hardly "at each other's throats." They have a complex "pecking" order of which wolf can dominate which other wolf, and the wolves all try to enhance their position within this system.



Exactly! My above point about wolves still stands.



How different in behavior do you think that a "person following the golden rule" would be in comparison to his/her relatives who are only one behavioral mutation removed from him/her?

One point I want to make first: "cities" does not equal "villages!"
You knocked the stuffing out of that scarecrow!

Do you really think that cities that have such conditions as above perform as well as similar cities that do not have such conditions (where altruism is more common)? And does the above really make a difference to our discussion? If morals come from evolution, and not from God, do you think that the above city-village comparison would not exist to be made? I hope you realize that the same people that live in big cities also live in small towns. Of course people in smaller groups act more responsibly than some in larger groups. There is more enforcement (on a per capita basis) present in smaller groups, and probably harsher penalties (ejection from the group, or worse) for violating those morals, wherever they come from. Everybody knows everybody in small towns, so if you do not "exercis[e] [y]our God-given proclivity to empathize and actualize that empathy" in a small town, you will much more likely not get away with it.

NPM

Majestyk

Since we're bringing animals into a discussion about animals that wonder where their morality comes from, haven't other ape communities exhibited similar social traits as humans? And isn't the argument here, that morality stems from evolved altruistic charcteristics that permit social habitation? So, actually morality isn't an exlusively human trait, we just have the ability to define it.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Happy,
You’ve made me happy. Thanks for the agreement... even tho you prefaced your agreeableness with “must” as in, “I must agree with Albert.” That “must” makes me seem like one of Star Trek’s Borg (“Resistance is futile.”) I’d much prefer that this agreement process be seen as a more genteel Spock mind-meld.

Naw. That’s a cop out. It’s like saying this dirt, by its dirtiness itself, is sufficient to explain filth.

Complexity is not even an entity. It’s an analytic construction, like how a red rose is red. That is, philosophically, complexity is the grammatical equivalent of an adjective (like “red”), something whose value is arbitrarily determined by us, not by virtue of its own nature or existence. Ergo, no meat will hang on that hook. To say that complexity is the cause of something else, is like saying red is the cause of a rose rather than an attribute of a rose.

Altruism and morality, on the other hand, qualify as synthetic entities that exist in and of themselves and not as an arbitrary determination of our minds. They are like the idea of straight: it exists in everyone’s mind as an a priori construction even tho every fence we’ve ever seen is crooked!

Ideas like altruism need explanations. And those explanations can’t be derived from ideas that are themselves derivatives, such as complexity. In other words, we can’t explain a meat hook by the red meat that hangs from it. – Cheers, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Wounded King

But undersatnding the meat hook allows us to understand how the meat can just hang in mid air like that.

Peez

No problem, I did not take it as rude. It was not my intention to "explain the evolution of human altruism," rather I wished to show that altruism can, in principle, evolve by the mechanisms of the theory of evolution. This was a point that you seemed to doubt, but perhaps I was mistaken. The specifics of the evolution of human behaviour are not known, any more than the specific path that a particular snowflake took before coming to rest on a branch: we know enough to understand how it could have come to be there and its being there does not challenge our understanding of physics, but the exact path cannot currently be worked out (and might not ever be).I am afraid that you have lost me here. What is the connection between altruism and eating our dead?As I said, the specifics of human evolution are not all known. We do not even understand the genetics of behaviour, though it is clear that there is a genetic basis. My goal was only to explain how altruistic behaviour can evolve by mutation and natural selection.

On a side note, it might be useful if we define "theory" in this context. It has been my experience that this word is often used in different ways by different people, and this can lead to misunderstandings (obviously). The definition that is typically used by scientists, and the one that applies to the theory of evolution, is the first one given in the Webster's dictionary that I happen to have handy:In the case of the theory of evolution, the "set of facts" is the evolution of living things through descent with modification from common ancestors. I don't want to get into a semantic argument, but it would be helpful if you could indicate exactly what definition of "theory" you are using.I don't wish to be too semantic, but I find this hard to follow. It implies a different definition of "altruistic" than the one typically used by biologists, and words like "think" and "feel" are poorly understood at best, particularly when applied to arthropods. According to the same Webster's dictionary:You seem to be using the first definition (more or less), and that is fine. However, words like "regard" or "devotion" refer to thought processes that are difficult to define and not well understood. I am suggesting that human behaviour is extraordinarily complex and not understood, and so we can hardly begin to examine the specific evolutionary pathway which produced it. More broadly, we can think about the evolution of altruism in the sense of the second definition. It is clear that such altruism can evolve by the mechanisms that we know about.I don't know what you mean by "have it both ways," but genetic drift is a well-understood mechanism of evolution. Your last line suggests that you did not understand. Natural selection always works through a competitive advantage, and is the only known mechanism that tends to produce adaptations. Genetic drift is random, but can result in a change in the frequencies of alleles. This change is random, without regard for the relative advantage that any given allele confers. Both natural selection and genetic drift may be at work in a population, but in large populations genetic drift tends to be weak, while in small populations it can be quite powerful. Any good introductory biology text book should explain this concept.You seem to be under the impression that mutation and natural selection are all there is to the theory of evolution. Natural selection gets the most attention, perhaps, because it is the mechanism that is responsible for adaptation. Although it might seem heretical to someone unfamiliar with the theory of evolution, genetic drift is nothing new:p. 297 of Evolutionary Biology, Third Edition by Douglas J. Futuyma (1998), Sinauer Ass. Inc.

In any event, this is quite tangential as the model that I presented does not require genetic drift to work.

Peez

Monkeybot

I am admittedly jumping in late, and I don't have as full an understanding as a lot of the posters here. But it seems to me that "moral" behaviour is not necessarily a disadvantage; group living is extremely advantageous for a lot of primate species. For example, living in a group can provide better access to food, better protection from predators, and a relatively steady access to mates than living alone might.

I can't help but wonder, and I'm speaking from a position of ignorance here, if the advantages of social living led to a system of "morals" that keep the social wheels greased. We see a lot of social activity among some primate species, like grooming and copulation, which of course are important by themselves, but which also double as social bonding activities. This would indicate that group harmony -- for lack of a better term -- is important in some species closely related to us, and after that, I don't think it's a big leap to human morals -- which, after all, are rules that help ensure social order.

Am I full of it?