Albert Cipriani

Dear Lost,
Quoting the textbook on her lap: Let’s see, leaf ants whose reciprocal altruism is responsible for the existence of fungi that they farm are LONG LIVED? INTELLIGENT?? and live within a SMALL GROUP SIZE??? Lost, you really are if you only read and do not develop critical reading skills.

Conversely:
Both yours and mine are nothing more than worthless bold-faced assertions. But mine is not quite as worthless because it has pedagogical value, and, besides, you started it! – Albert the Traditional Catholic

Wounded King

Ants would clearly be a better subject for the kin selection model Albert. If the whole hive doesn't work to keep the queen alive and reproductive then no-ones genes are going anywhere.

Doubting Didymus

I do believe that this is an excellent thread. You're such a catalyst, Albert.

Thought I'd deal with this:

Here your case against kin selection rests on the premise that the kin selection altruism trait is produced by a single gene. Get that thought right out of your mind! Genes are not deterministic factors, but influential ones. While there are SOME traits that are under the direct influence of a single, or a few genes, (say, human blood type), most of the important traits have a great many genes that all influence the same trait, and then the trait is affected by non-heritable factors also.

Allow me to take human skin color as an example. One of the reasons that blended inheritance was so popular before mendel was the common-sense way that human skin colors seem to be blends of their parent. The actual reason for this phenomenon is that there are many genes working in complicated interactive webs, with various dominance patterns, all affecting the same trait. Mutations in areas like this are capable of having varying degrees of effect on the trait, by affecting one gene but none of the others.

I have no doubt at all that the human brains complex interrelationships are under the influence of a staggering number of genes, which are themselves probably tangled in hugely intricate relationships. I would be quite shocked to discover any major part of our personalities that was under the influence of a single gene. Like skin color, this situation allows for mutations with small and gradual effect, not a lightning strike mutation at all.

Secondly, even if it were a single large scale mutation, which the parents in your example do not share, what is to stop the mutant individual having its OWN altruistic children? The kin selection of the altruism trait by proxy may not work in the first instance, but certainly in the next generation it does, as the original mutant may be at a disadvantage, but it is hardly a lethal one.

Thirdly: I am suspicious of assertions that the actual moral sense (as opposed to simple altruism) is under any direct genetic influence at all. I strongly suspect that morality is derived from the fundamental human neural functions I mentioned earlier: Empathy, one of the basic abilites that founds our brains' spectacular capacities, and the ability to plot cause and effect, another fundamental ingredient in having a complex mind. I imagine genes working on these traits in a way that makes a moral sense possible. The actual morality iteself, therefore, comes from our own application of our fundamental capacities. Kin selection and reciprocal altruism, if they have a genetic basis, are therefore working indirectly on related traits.

Albert Cipriani

Wounded and Oolon arguing circuitously:
You’ve assumed your conclusion in your premise. How do we know that evolution hasn’t “primed us” to help blue-eyed blonds? Why, because many brunets are also helped. If that’s cogent to you, then you should have no problem with God having primed only His chosen ones to know of His existence. What’s that? You don’t know of God’s existence? Just goes to prove my point that He only primed His chosen ones and you obviously ain’t been chosen.

What primes us to help others has nothing to do with our being related to them, but everything to do with our perceived ability to relate to them. Thus, a total stranger suffering something I once suffered, is more likely to evoke my altruism than my own flesh and blood whom I have nothing in common with and who need me to bailed them out of jail again.

Likewise, we are more empathetic to members of our own race, not because we are more related to them, but because of our perceived ability to be more able to relate to them than others who do not share our common heritage.

No one can even know that anyone exists. So we all hunger for assurances that others are truly like us. Thus, we talk. Thus, we dress alike and try to look alike. To the degree others talk, look, dress and act like us, they assuage our sense of existential aloneness and banish our doubts about other humans. But these cultural/racial commonalities do not prime us, as you say, to act altruistically. Rather, our ability to even notice them presuppose that we are already touched by altruistic tendencies, already seeking proof that we are not alone.

In short, altruism is the objective expression of the subjective emotion of empathy. We cannot be altruistic towards those whom we do not empathize with. Why we empathize then becomes the question. I think empathy is the emotional balm that ameliorates the rash intellectual solipsism that we may be alone. To the degree that we can imagine (i.e., empathize) that others are just like us, and feel what we feel, then they might even be worth dying for, or we might be willing to die for them out of gratitude.

A great film that deals with this issue is Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai.” – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Doubting Didymus

I agree with this entirely. Well put.

Wounded King

Dear Albert,

Could you point out where my reasoning was circuitous? Or we you suggesting that our arguments, taken together, formed a circuit? If so I dont see it.

Well now it sounds as if having skirted over the fundamental basis of consciousness we are going to start on theories of mind.

If all altruism is based on empathy are we not simply trying to alleviate our own discomfort, all of these things seem to be not so much altruistic as self gratifying. Perhaps the only truly altruistic actions can be those resulting in death, and maybe not even those. I am rapidly coming to the belief, and not for the first time, that the whole concept of altruism is flawed.

TTFN,

Wounded

Albert Cipriani

Dear Wounded,
When evolutionists attempt to “explain” altruism between family members as the result of altruistic family members having family members, they’ve committed the circulus in demonstrando fallacy. They’ve assumed what they need to argue.

Oolon and you collectively seem to me to be doing that when you assert kin selection as a theory for “explaining” altruism when altruism, by its metaphysical nature, is actually induced by our sense of kinship. It’s kind of like tautologically explaining her red dress as being, well, red.

Duh. Tell us something we don’t already know. Fact is your operative word, “enough,” defies analysis. What do we know enough of? Certainly not God nor evolution. Ergo, we should fold our tents and steal into the night!?

The human condition is one in which with necessarily incomplete knowledge we make “hard and fast statements,” and even more importantly, ACT on those dogmas. This is what makes us noble, our actions heroic, and serves to perfume our otherwise unbearable stench.

Of all that you’ve written, this is the saddest: Translation: your notion of doing good to others is indistinguishable from your doing good to yourself. That is, your morality is a euphemism for hedonism. Or more to the point, your morality is morality in name only.

No wonder you “suspect” that all those people who die for other people “are deluding themselves.” They dive onto an exploding hand grenade to save their buddies because their “wish to feel good about their selves” morally for a split second outweighs their impending unimaginable physical pain. Yeah. Everybody knows that the experience of a split second of feeling good about ourselves is well worth the cost of physical pain and the cessation of ever being able to feel anything good ever again.

I think you need to fall in love. That’s the safety net that could save you from your brain. Words can’t. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Autonemesis

And so is that of any Christian, or religiously-derived moralilty. For if gods do not exist, your morality is "mere" sentimentality as well (and they don't, so it is).

Happy Wonderer

This is so well put that I'd like to agree with it -- but there is good evidence that empathy has to be taught. Setting aside for a moment the researchers who study human development, simply watch the parent/child interactions of kids in the 2-4yo range.

How many times will you hear statements like "Don't push Jeremy, how would you like it if somebody pushed you?" "Don't pull on Spot's tail, how would you like it if someone pulled your ear?" It is such a common interaction that we mostly ignore it as part of the background noise. We don't say "my, what a good parent to be teaching empathy!" In fact, if it is absent we criticize the parent.

We can be taught that others are not like us, therefore it was no big deal to white Americans when a colored person was whipped or multilated for running away.

Now nothing in life is simple. There are sociopaths who seem to lack the capacity for feeling empathy -- and they are not always from "bad" backgrounds. There is undoubtably a physical component (genetic if you like) that if absent impairs the ability of humans to learn empathy.

So if the question is "wherefore empathy" my answer would be shaded towards "society." As to why society should encourage that, see my previous posts: without empathy it is less likely that we would function as the social species that we are.

hw

Wounded King

Dear Albert,

Since all I was doing was pointing out that your use of leaf cutter ants as an example of reciprocal-altruism not relying on comlex social development, long life etc was not particularly relevant as they were a very obvious example of kin selection. I never suggested that kin selection was the basis of all forms of altruism.

Your version of kinship, presumably based on empathy, and that of kin selection, supposedly based on genetic relatedness, are quite distinct.

When you say

You seem to be be making an unwarranted assertion her, one which you yourself then proceed to dismiss.

A statement which seems to be solely based on your own subjective feelings, given the number of people who do keep bailing out their misguided kin folk.

I enjoyed seeing you take a "quote" from a completely different post and try and put it in the context of my comments on ultimate self sacrifice.

As to the grenade question, I see the choice as more between the pain of almost certainly dying but saving your friends, or the pain of possibly dying and knowing if your friends died that you could have saved them. But given the incredibly short time span required to make these decisions it is ard to know what thoughts, if any, run through peoples heads.

And towards the end you seem to be launching a personal attack on my character, thanks, I love you too.