Kevbo

This issue deserves its own discussion. The whole idea of having an empirical theory is not so we don't need faith, it is so that we can explain the world with the tools we've got. Certain fundamentalists aside, the God part of the equation is a pretty big variable when figuring out how things work. An empirical theory remains neutral to the concept of a deity, and just makes due with the methods and evidence we physically have availabl.

Happy Wonderer

Why? You had a poetic and fanciful example earlier, but not a very realistic one. Why would helping out another -- at little or no cost to myself -- be a disadvantage? We are not talking about sacrficing your life for others; such extreme examples are rare in the course of human existance. It is the everyday low-risk acts that have more cumulative import: warning a fellow motorist of a danger ahead (be it a rock or a cop!), pulling a stranger's child back when they start to run into the street, or telling an acquaintance about a particularly good place to eat.

All of these little acts help us as a group. Yes, we are increasing the survival probability of a stranger but life is not a zero-sum game! Saving the life of a stranger's kid has zero net effect on my reproductive probability. (Maybe a positive effect if his mom is attractive and divorced )

It could be that individuals are altruistic for a completely genetically random reason (a neutral mutation.) However -- a group of individuals with that mutation will outreproduce another group without it. Their kids get run over by cars while bystanders look passively on. "Our" kids are saved by group members. Over time, our trait becomes dominant.

Now echoing Kevbo, I'm not entirely convinced that altruism as anything interesting to do with the wiring of the brain. This is an important point that I have been trying to make: if altruism is learned, then there really is no interesting question here for the evolution/creation debate. (If there is, I'd like to hear it.)

hw

So far this has been a fascinating discussion, people! Something to keep my mind off of Iraq, thanks!

Doubting Didymus

Happy wonderer: the evolutionary implications of altruism are just as pertinent when we're talking about species who don't learn. Leaf cutter ants are an example: the drones are very altruistic towards the queen, and the colony is reciprocally altruistic toward the farmed fungus species. No-one suggests that ants learn these behaviours.

I think I agree with you that morality is generally learned, but I do think that we needed to have empathy and cause effect capacitied hardwired into our brains before morality is at all possible.

Wounded King

Albert,

You seem to be ignoring the fact that there are numerous examples of cannibalistic human populations. Though as was pointed out, cannibalism is not neccessarily such a hot idea. The Fore tribe which practiced ritual cannibalism, until recently, suffered from a prion disease know as Kuru.

God works in mysterious ways is possibly the best theological argument of all, why cant creationists, not neccessarily you Albert, just leave it at that instead of trying to tell us the ways he works?

Non-praying Mantis

Albert, mutations that might lead to altruism could arise as parental care mutations. Did you think about my wolf example I mentioned in the Perspectives of Complexity thread?

Imagine a species of animal that just leaves eggs around after they are laid. These individuals have no altruistic behaviors. Now, a mutant behavior emerges: one mother hangs around and protects her eggs. This mutant mother would actually have an immediate advantage over her peers because their eggs get eaten by predators or parasites, and hers do not. Now, this behavior appears nowhere else in her repertoire of behaviors, and only appears after egg laying. Wouldn't this mutation be an advantage, not a disadvantage?



Ah, I see a problem with this statement. Do you think that an entire village of non-altruistic individuals could exist? Wouldn't they be at each others throats and not be able to work together as a village? Wouldn't they have to live a solitary existence?

Altruism is what actually allows us to live in villages! An entire village of such mutants would seem to have quite an advantage over solitary less scrupulous competitors!

In both of my above examples, that would seem not to be the case.

NPM

caravelair

i haven't read through this entire thread, because i don't have time right now... exams coming up... anyways, i'm just mentioning that in case i say something that has already been discussed, or in case my post seems a little off topic... anyways...

i took social and cultural anthropology this year, and i learned that every culture has an entirely different set of morals. the ONLY moral which is universal to all cultures is the incest taboo. there is no other moral present in all cultures. so it's silly to say that morals are something that we are born with, because if they were, we would all share the same morals. morals are clearly a product of culture, not a biological characteristic that has to be accounted for by evolution.

Albert Cipriani

Gee NPM,
Why the patronization: You’re treating me like a moron. Perhaps if I hadn’t expressed my appreciation for learning things here and at the TalkOrigins site, you guys would back off out of your schoolmarm role with me.

Your wolf and chicken example fall short as models for how altruism conforms to evolutionary theory because the parental care behavior of chickens is more akin to kin selection and the wolf pack behavior is just reciprocal altruism, not real altruism. I know you know this. That’s why you used the fuzzy expressions “might lead to altruism” and “could arise.”

I thought we were clear on the moralistic (not biological) definition of “altruism.” That is, neither reciprocality nor family predicates altruism. Morally, altruism is only altruism if performed without any notion of a payback and out of no sense of familial obligation, but rather, out of a cognitive sense of existential identity with another.

Yes, wolf packs would be selected over lone wolves. Yes, mother hens who actually mothered their eggs would be selected over hens that just laid eggs. How to connect the mutations responsible for these behaviors with the mutations responsible for a Green Peace person in a rubber raft putting himself between the harpoon gun and a whale is beyond me. That is what we are trying to find an empirical explanation for.

Maternal and pack instincts are proto-altruistic behaviors. It seems disingenuous to simply say that they therefore must “lead to altruism.” That’s no less absurd than saying within a child’s crayon scribbling we can see the outline of a proto-alphabet, which, therefore, must lead to a new language.

Yes, in the same way your pack of wolves exist, at each other’s throats yet collectively at the throats of game as well. The moment an empathetic wolf cub came unto its own and was able to express altruistic behaviors, such behaviors would be exploited as weaknesses by the pack.

No more so than a pack of wolves.

No. But the first person who was genetically programmed to be able to follow the Golden Rule would. Perhaps that’s why holy men have always tended to live in the desert or on mountain tops.

Sure, that’s why our cities don’t have police departments, locks, barbed wire fences, pimps, crack babies, and used car salesmen. That’s why a few hours after the lights in New York went out in the 1970’s, the police STOPPED arresting the looters and muggers, for in just a few hours their 30,000 arrests had already filled their jail cells to capacity. Whereas, as everyone knows, monasteries, farms, communes, campsites, and hermitages are all run like police states.

You’ve got it ass-backwards. A LACK of altruism is precisely what is wrong with the people EXISTING in our cities. And it is why they are not truly living, that is, living in a more natural environment with less people around them so that they can get to know their neighbors, a prerequisite for exercising our God-given proclivity to empathize and actualize that empathy through altruism. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Peez

Hi folks,

Just to put this discussion in context, it seems to be about whether or not the mechanisms described in the theory of evolution are sufficient to explain the evolution of "morality" or altruism. That is to say, it does not address the fact that living things have evolved from common ancestors, only that the mechanism accepted by scientists is at least incomplete. If I have misunderstood, please let me know.

There are certainly questions about the evolution of altruism, and this is what fuels continuing research, but I can see no barrier in principal to the evolution of altruism by the mechanisms described in the theory of evolution. Some very good points have already been made, I will just add my two cents.

SIMPLISTIC MODEL
Imagine a population of entirely "selfish" gronks (e.g. they eat any gronk eggs that they find, though these eggs make up very little of their diet). A mutation leads to one of them being born with a new allele (gene) that causes it to be only slightly altruistic (it will only eat gronk eggs if it is very hungry). This might provide a very small advantage (if the eggs that the gronk is most likely to see are its own, then the mortality of its eggs could be reduced), or it might be neutral (any advantage from decreased egg mortality might be balanced by the decrease in egg production caused by a decrease in food eaten), or it might provide a very small disadvantage (the dominant effect could be the reduction in food). It is easy to see how natural selection could favour the mutant allele if it provided an advantage, and this would tend to result in that allele becoming more common in the population.

Eventually a second mutation results in another new allele that results in the gronk being more likely to eat an egg the less it smells like its own. This would make the gronk less likely to eat its own, while still being able to take advantage of the food that other eggs might provide. Such individuals would tend to have an advantage, obtaining more food than their fellows but retaining the low egg mortality. Natural selection could then cause an increase in the frequency of that allele. A side effect of this is that the eggs of close kin would tend to be spared more than the eggs of more or less unrelated individuals, because they might have a smell very similar to the gronk's own eggs (after all, these close kin are genetically similar). Such an effect does not cancel the advantage that the most recent mutant allele has conferred: the gronk still gets more eggs for food than it's rivals and still maintains similar egg mortality. However, as this allele is passed on for a few generations, the close kin now also carry this allele. At this point the tendency to spare the eggs of close kin will act as "kin selection", increasing the advantage that the allele conferred.

Let's go back to the original mutant allele that caused gronks to avoid eating gronk eggs. If the population was small, the frequency might increase even if the allele provided no advantage. Natural selection is not the only mechanism in the theory of evolution. Genetic drift can result in changes in allele frequency, and in small populations can be stronger than natural selection. Thus the scenario might work even if the first mutant allele was mildly disadvantageous.

This is a simplistic model, but it at least shows that altruism can, in principle, evolve through the mechanisms of the theory of evolution. More complex models could take into account environmental variance, genotype x environment interactions, epistasis, the evolution of group membership, etc., but the bottom line is that the existence of altruism does not provide any reason to doubt the theory of evolution.

Peez

Peez

I expect that this depends on how one defines a "moral" and how specific one is. Personally, I disagree with the idea that "every culture has an entirely different set of morals" (my emphasis). Murdering your neighbour because you are bored is frowned upon in Japan, Ireland, Chad, Nepal, Nunavut, and a few other places. I would suggest that all human cultures put at least some value on collectivity.

That being said, one cannot ignore cultural evolution. Humans have evolved the ability to absorb culture, and cultures can evolve relatively independent of the biological units that carry them.

Peez

caravelair

sorry, i didn't mean that no 2 cultures share any particular morals. what i meant was that no particular moral is universally shared by all cultures except the incest taboo. then again, i'm not the one who did the research, i'm just reiterating what my textbook says.