Happy Wonderer

I can't resist jumping in on this (sorry). Note that a person who jumps onto a hand grenade is making a choice of:

A) don't jump on hand grenade, everybody, including me, dies.
B) jump on hand grenade, only I die.

I do not know of stories of men who run from safe distances in order to jump onto a hand grenade that lands near their buddies. In your example the distance between the selfish action and the altruistic one is not that great.


hw

Albert Cipriani

Dear Doubting,
Granted. But somewhere along the line of dominoes we must assume the emergent property of empathy required some sort of operative shove in the form of a genetic mutation. The single mutation that was operative amidst all the other precursory mutations is the one under scrutiny.

Ditto for me. But it’s convenient to speak of it as such, like the solar system model of atoms, which is not at all physically accurate but communicatively useful.

Scratch my hyperbolic “lightening” motif. Point is, evolution must at some point have stepped up to the plate and mutated one domino that set the others off and caused a single ancestor to express altruistic behavior. Let’s not mush the outlines of what evolution did under the minutia of how it did it.

Assuming the mutant’s altruism does not prove to be lethal to its chances of getting reproductively lucky, its offspring would be under the same disadvantage. If we invoke isolation as the incubator of this mutant population, it only seems to extend their day of reckoning. An entire village of such mutants seems no less likely to be doomed amidst villages of their less scrupulous competitors.

Altruism seems survivable only if the entire species were simultaneously afflicted with its proclivities. How altruism could emerge in one-zies and two-zies as evolution demands, seems untenable.

Cause and effect is the stuff of pragmatism, not morality. Our cause-and-effect tool making proclivities say nothing about the use to which we put those tools.

Indeed, morality often times does not work and is the antithesis of pragmatism. For example, it’s our moral sense that prohibits us from using our common sense and eating our dead. Even Neanderthals eking their extinction out on the edges of the last ice age buried their dead whole. God knows, they could have used the meat! – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Kevbo

One important thing to realize in the analysis of the evolutionary origins of reason and morality is that evolution does not operate strictly upon each mutation building a new advantage that is immediately realized. A new mutation arising that expresses a new function need not to factor into the direct chance of survival of an organism to be evolutionarily valid. Not every mutation is directly selected for. If a an organism happens to survive and propagate mutated genes, which is not an unreasonable assumption due to the fact that many organisms survive without any apparent mutations, these genes may be selected for in the population on average somewhere down the road.

This means that genes may exist that are not directly expressed but become useful later, and it also means that mutations can propagate without creating a retroactive situation of direct advantage, such as the family morality issue. Natural selection works more as a law of averages than a deterministic acid test.

Doubting Didymus

You are still thinking of a single altruistic individual coming into a world where it is not known. The 'first' altrustic individual would be very slightly more altruistic than normal, so small a change as to have only minor, yet still significant effects on its survival. This individual is hard to distinguish from its selfish bretherin, and does not experience too much of a drawback. Future generations can build on this, bringing more and more slightly altruistic individuals into being. By the time altruism is a notable chage in behavious, organisms are already being born into a slightly altruistic population.


I think you missed the point a little. The idea is that altruism can emerge in creeping steps, not large scale behavioural change. The first altrustic individual would be under some disadvantage, but not too much.

Remember that we are talking about kin selection altruism here. The atruism is not the same thing as utter selflessness, it applies only to those individuals that are percieved as kin. So what we see in the family of altruistic organisms is everyone helping each other out, within the family group. The genes that influence altruism are going to benifit from that behaviour, even should one of the family sacrafice themselves for the others. By sacraficing itself, the gene has insured that the copies of itself are preserved for the next generation via the heroic individuals siblings and other relatives. Remember that in kin selection altruism, the altruistic tendencies are not extended to strangers, who are less likely to posess the gene.

I hope to have shown just now that this is not true. The altruism trait derived from kin selection needs only to be present in a single family, and that gene will reap the benifits. By working together and protecting each other, the family, then the extended family, and eventually large groups within the species, are in posession of a distinct advantage over those groups where backstabbing is at large.

I agree that cause and effect is not good enough on it own to give rise to morality. However, I think that when coupled with empathy it has all the needed ingredients. It is when one can empathise with out fellows, understand a desire or an emotional need they would have, and THEN plot the cause and effects to bring the improved state about that moral actions are possible. It is therefore not neccesarily morality itself that needs an evolutionary explanation, only empathy and effect plotting, which have their own pragmatic uses.

Happy Wonderer

Actually it isn't common sense to eat members of your own species. Even eating closely-related species can be a bad idea; one fairly strong theory for the introduction of the AIDS virus into the human population is that it jumped species through the consumption of 'bush meat'.

CJD (mad cow) is another example. Eating the dead of your own species is a sure way to ingest pathogens that have the ability to infect you.

hw

Kevbo

Except when it produces an evolutionary advantage, as is the case with the black widow spider. The black widow kills her mate after mating to reduce the strain on resources. Some species have evolved cannibalism, and some have evolved altruism. There's more than one way to solve a problem.

Kevbo

A corrolary to the above would be the observation that no male of a species habitually tends to eat the female after mating. This situation would not make evolutionary sense, and it doesn't exist.

LostGirl

Ouch! Stings a little; but not as much as one would think because these aren't my assertions; they're the textbook's. I may have presented them without context, however, I was already unsure about quoting directly from the text at all without posting huge chunks as potential exacerbation of a probable error. Given the nature of the textbook source, I thought that the basis of peer-approved journal articles would be assumed. But, okay.

Doubting Didymus is correct (as usual) and leaf-cutter ants are a better example of kin selection and not reciprocal altruism, which (as I prepare to quote once more, from the same source) "provides one theoretical framework for studying cooperation among non-kin". Notice that I wasn't talking about degree of relatedness in any of the conditions that reciprocal altruism is likely to occur within?
To be honest, the text (since that's what's at issue here) refers to the relationship between the ants and the fungus as a mutually beneficial symbiosis between two species. Reciprocal altruism is generally considered in an intraspecies, not interspecies context. The relationship between ants and fungus is coevolutionarily symbiotic to the extent that it is obligate (one cannot exist without the other).
However, the two species did not "cospeciate" - that is, cause the speciation of the other. In at least two cases (Chapela, et al, 1994) the ants of an ancestral population essentially domesticated wildtype fungus, and the coevolution to obligate symbiosis developed from there. Also, speciation events with in this taxon do tend to be cospeciation events - dispersing ants take some fungus from the home colony with them to start their new garden. In any case, the ants acquired fungal symbionts more than once.
Still, not an example of reciprocal altruism, sorry. [mumble, mutter]cast aspersions on my critical reading skills![/mumble/mutter]


I'm not saying that kin selection and reciprocal altruism aren't tightly linked in human and other populations; but that the theories as presented in standard evolutionary analysis courses at the third year level of universities as of today indicate they're different kinds of selection pressures.


The point I was trying to convey in the first place was that given the kinds of animals we were, in the kinds of situations we found ourselves in, developing traits like reciprocal altruism was extremely probable. Probale because we are(were) social animals with small group size, low rates of dispersal from the group, and a high degree of mutual dependance. Our closest relatives, chimps, have stronger social hierarchies, and so are "less likely to be able to provide benefits in return for altruistic acts dispensed by dominant individuals."
Blood sharing in vampire bats (see: Wilkinson, G.S. 1984. Reciprocal food sharing in the vampire bat.Nature 308:181-184.) is indeed the classic example of reciprocal altruism.

Regarding pedagogy: The means, methods and styles of teaching my university uses to inculcate me with such ideas is, itself, a pedagogy. So too is the process my sister uses to teach RAD ballet syllabus to her dance students. Whatever I may think of the value of textbook readings in the pedagogical sense, it generally considered a valued way of providing students with reliable sources.non

Albert Cipriani

Doubting and Kevbo,
You are Finches singing a duet:
and

This seems so maddeningly disingenuous! How does whether or not a single mutation (or multiple mutations) expresses itself gradually or suddenly (or intermittently for that matter!) matter? The evolutionary principle remains the same: the mutation incrementally improves the odds of the mutation’s replication. But when the mutation is for altruism, a monkey wrench is thrown into the works of our evolutionary descent.

As a technical writer, when I’m not sure I understand what the engineers are trying to say and when I am sure I understand them, I do the same thing, I put what I think they’ve said into my own words. In either case, my understanding generally is modified by more information. In that spirit, I will ‘splain what I think you think.

The genetic factors that allow us to feel good when we do good, the many genes that dispose us to empathetic emotions and altruistic behaviors evolved over a long long time. So gradually did they evolve that the first altruistic primates were behaviorally indistinguishable from their heartless brethren. Thus, they suffered no competitive disadvantage. Since the unexpressed “altruistic” gene set provided no basis from which natural selection could select, the basis for its selection remains a mystery. All we know is that all human primates -- except for sociopaths – eventually got the “altruistic” gene set and it turned on more or less all at once so, again, none of the kinder gentler brutes were ever at a competitive disadvantage.

The just-as-logical abridged version of this tale is as follows: God works in mysterious ways.

Do you understand my difficulty?

Truth be told, as repugnant as the theory of evolution is, I’m becoming inclined to stop resisting it. Maybe I already have stopped resisting. (“Resistance is futile” say the Borg.) But so far I’ve no choice but to resist evolution’s explanation for the origins of morality. It requires faith!

I might as well squander my faith on a God then on a godless theory. The whole idea of having an empirical theory is so we don’t have to have faith. But the evolution of morality requires the worst of both worlds. – Frustratedly, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Kevbo

I understand your difficulty, Albert, it's an extremely complex topic that takes years of study and active research to really understand. I know that I don't understand it fully. That being said, I think that I can use what I know of evolutionary processes to describe the emergence of what we call altruism. It would help a lot if a real evolutionary biologist could jump in here and correct the speculation of us mere mortals.

I think that the roots of the trait we call altruism can be observed much farther back than the early primate lineage. It seems to have matured in other species as well, considering the relationship between kin and hive societies that exist in the animal world.

The trait that predisposes us to care for our young is really a given in terms of prediction, it is easy to see the evolutionary advantage of this trait. It makes evolutionary sense to take that slightly further and say that it is not unreasonable to have developed an affection for those who share our common gene pool. It makes just as much evolutionary sense to care for a mate and band together (human tendency) as it does to kill a male mate after copulation to save resources that are competed over (Black widow tendency) in terms of evolution, these are both advantageous mechanisms for propagating genes. As long as some sort of mechanism allows organisms to relate to their kin in an evolutionarily positive or neutral way, evolutionary theory can predict its existence. What we call altruism is only one possible scenario that could have occurred.

I would like to take the discussion a step further, though, into the realm of "nature vs. nurture." There are a myriad of interacting traits within humans that produce our behavior. We have many that produce altruism in certain situations, and many which produce selfishness. This is evident, people are sometimes selfish and sometimes altruistic. Each of these mechanisms has some sort of evolutionary function in different situations. Being selfish and competitive is advantageous to survival at times, and being cooperative is advantageous to survival at other times. Our minds have evolved to be able to understand the cues that determine what type of action is appropriate to what situation. This gives further strength to the evolutionary significance of raising the young, because nurture factors so greatly into our views on the world.

As an interesting side-note, the human infant is noticably helpless compared to the young of other animals. The large size of the human cranium needed to hold our brains necessitates that we are born earlier than some other animals, while we can still pass through the hip bone of our mothers. While it would make just as much evolutionary sense to have mothers with wider hips, chance dictated that we would be born early and care for our young.