jay pettitt on 2/2/2012 at 22:00

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Does anybody else know what he's talking about?

Deep breath Beleg. I know English isn't your first language. What is "where is the natural support for the active decision to chose excatly the 5% way, since it's obviously against the evolutionary idea of one's own survival?" supposed to mean.

Do you mean - why would altruism lead you to deliberately sacrifice your own life for someone else?

Pyrian on 2/2/2012 at 22:34

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I'm not entirely clear on this, either, as jay pettitt points out, but it sounds like you're claiming that evolution cannot produce general solutions that are less than perfect in specific situations. But that's not only not true, it's actually one of the prime signifiers of a "trial & error" creation as opposed to a design.

We expect to find "imperfect solutions that mostly work but have little blindspots that mostly don't come up day-to-day" in an evolved organism. And in fact we find such things all over ourselves. Things that, as design errors, are nonsensical, but as trial-and-error results, are functional enough to get by.

faetal on 2/2/2012 at 23:02

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First off, kudos for this not being your native tongue - I didn't notice, though some peculiarities in the prose now make sense.

We are indeed talking about the same altruism - the positive emotional feedback derived from expending energy in making someone else's life better somehow. It doesn't matter if compensated for altruism doesn't interest you - reality does not mould itself to the whims of individuals. I'm not sure I follow where you are with the "duping" thing. Altruism is doing something which is more for others' benefit than your own simply because you want to. Nothing to do with what any human individual would term a reward. The biological reward happens at the population level and is not directly experienced by the individuals, evolution just selected the behaviour because it conferred a benefit, again, at the population level. We are essentially the unwilling slaves of our genes in a lot of ways. In this sense, we are altruistic as a result of the altruism genes doing better than the alternative. Just to re-iterate, this would have had its beginnings in an ancestral species way before humans came along - probably with something simple like meat sharing in large groups in order to benefit from the group as a whole. From such basic origins, it developed over time into something more complex. Into something so complex, that many people can not accept that it is a natural phenomenon and instead indulge in the logical fallacy of an argument from incredulity.



Ethical structures correspond very neatly to evolution. If you are really interested, I can dig out some reading on the subject. The more you study evolutionary psychology, the more obvious it seems that we have the ethical structures we do. It's a fascinating subject, far more so than the idea that ethics were invented as a social mechanism to somehow counter a species of violent sociopaths.

DDL on 3/2/2012 at 10:05

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The impression I'm kinda getting is that Beleg wants us to agree with the statement

"To be altruistic is natural for humans, but to be truly stupidly altruistic, even when it makes no sense, takes religion."

...which even though it casts religion in a pleasingly negative light, I still don't agree with.

Beleg: this passage



seems to be the source of the biggest conceptual disconnect. I'm not entirely sure what you're saying here, nor who in this hypothetical scenario is religious and who is not, nor exactly what the responses would be either way.

If you are saying that natural selection for altruism leads to people deliberately standing around blithely smiling while others rob them blind, i.e. they are aware of the robbery but actively choose to do nothing because of.."altruism", then well: this is not actually an impossible scenario in evolution, but it would probably be rare: it's essentially a cost:benefit analysis:

There's the cost of challenging everyone that comes by, and the degree to which you challenge them, vs the benefits of not getting your stuff stolen.

At one extreme, you challenge everyone that wanders by, and spend so much time barking rabidly at people that you barely have time to acquire stuff to BE stolen. This is unfavourable, and would only be selected for if the chances of any given passerby being a robber was very, very high.

At the other extreme, you challenge nobody, and spend all your time acquiring stuff. If the incidence of thievery is zero, i.e. nobody steals it, this is an optimal solution for the given state, but of course then (in a separate evolutionary development) this is an ideal state for thievery to evolve, since a thief will have a huge competitive advantage in this situation.

Now if we take this, and extend so that the thieves become hugely prevalent, you could either get a scenario where the "people acquiring stuff" are wiped out by the thieves, who subsequently then die out. End of evolutionary line for all concerned.

Alternatively, since you are now putting pressure on the 'farmers' (since people acquiring stuff is getting tedious to type), traits that favour challenging passers by, which previously (in a thief-free environment) would've been detrimental -time spent challenging is less time spent farming- are now becoming favourable, so over time farmers that naturally challenge passers by will be more successful, and thus become more prevalent.

As time passes, the rate at which farmers challenge, and the overall percentage of thieves, may thus reach a rough equilibrium. At this point the cost to the farmer of challenging people who turn out not to be thieves, and the cost of not challenging those who are thieves are in balance (since those who tend more to either direction will be less successful) -natural selection has selected for the optimal challenge rate for the environment.
Similarly, since the more thieves there are, the more you select for 'challenge-happy' farmers, you tend to select for a low level of thieves, rather than lots.

If you have a stable thief/farmer equilibrium, this will be the case. And crucially, if you DON'T have a stable thief/farmer equilibrium, you very shortly won't have any thieves and farmers. Evolution selects for the equilibrium because the non-balanced scenarios die off.

Now you can complicate this enormously by adding things like "analysis of potential thieves", i.e. "does this person look shifty", which of course is a highly desirable trait, and one that's been selected for -we're actually very good at judging intent of others, as a species. And of course, then "being able to disguise your intent" becomes a similarly desirable trait, and lo and behold, we're also very good at masking our intents, as a species.

It's an arms race, essentially. All of nature is.

So back to your weird "5%" thing. If you're asking "why would evolution select for someone who decides to be unlucky", in a pure scenario, not other caveats, I'd have to say..it wouldn't. And to be frank, any religion that encourages people to "decide to be unlucky" would also be a crappy religion, and would vanish from our thoughts pretty rapidly.

At no point does anything in evolution of altruism via natural selection suggest that (in isolation) it selects for people willing to hand their families over to rapists coz "lol altruism". Similarly, any religion that suggests you should hand your families over to rapists is a dumb religion that wouldn't last very long nowadays. -I say 'nowadays', because I recall that handing over families to rapists actually happens on several ocasions in the old testament. While this is hardly a sterling advertisement for the bible, it was presumably a 'different time', with different cost/benefit equilibria.

A key point there is of course, "in isolation". If there's a net benefit in handing over your family (even if it is a tiny, tiny benefit), then it becomes a selectable trait. If, for instance, defending your family is costly (you might die, so they all get raped anyway), but families are cheap and easy to produce -breeding times are short, mates are in plentiful supply, offspring are numerous- then it makes sense to just cut your losses. And this happens in nature.

It's much rarer in humans, because for our species it's insanely time- and resource-consuming to raise offspring (as any parents in this thread will no doubt concur). So for us, considering only the cost/benefit analysis of this exact scenario, it's usually better to fight.

Now, note that this is 'as a population as a whole' thing, so we're always looking at probabilities, not individual cases (despite my use of 'you' and so on). On balance, if it's more beneficial for a species to do X, X will become more prevalent. In many, many cases, X may be THE WRONG THING TO DO for the situation. However, if in the majority of cases, X is the correct response, X will be favoured. It doesn't even need to be a big majority.

And also note: in not all cases will the species even do X, usually it's another equilibrium state, where the optimum for the species is "doing X 78% of the time" or whatever, because everyone doing X is unfavourable, but nobody doing X is also unfavourable.

It's not so much that "we act a given way to be successful", but that "those of us that naturally act a given way ARE successful". It's a tricky thought system to get used to, and even I find myself slipping out of it sometimes (for instance, it's easier to say "bacteria have designed very clever proteins for pumping antibiotics out of themselves", rather than say "random mutation and untold billions of deaths have left us with a scant few bacteria who have acquired through utter chance, a system for pumping antibiotics out of themselves rather inefficiently. More random mutation and further untold billions of deaths have left us with a scant few bacteria that have acquired through utter chance, changes to that drug pumping system that make it highly efficient").

So in terms of humans, we're not altruistic because we decided it was the best way of being successful. We are successful because we were naturally a bit altruistic and this happened to be a hugely successful trait. Over time, since increased altruism is favoured, we naturally become more altruistic.

And then you add cultural development as I noted above, and the whole thing starts to look a bit strange, because genetically we're still tribal animals with hunter-gatherer lifestyles, yet here we are arguing across the world about religion via magical boxes.:p

Also, I'm...really not sure what I was intending to say, in all that. I think I got carried away. :erg:

Oh, yeah: could you please clarify the quoted passage, with reference to what exact scenario is occurring, and who involved (if any) are religious?

faetal on 3/2/2012 at 12:31

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I think Beleg is trying to insinuate that altruism has a nature and nurture aspect. I'd say that's largely irrelevant since nurture is a feedback mechanism also arising from nature. I can understand the religious perspective in wanting dominion over morality though, since they no longer have the weather, natural disasters, disease, crop success/failure, biological diversity, creation of celestial bodies etc.., so the fall back is generally "well without religion, we wouldn't have morality".

I've had the discussions, which usually follow this course:

Me: Well I am atheist and have very strong morals.

Person: Yes, but you were taught them by your parents.

Me: They are atheists too - religion was never involved in my upbringing.

Person: All morality is derived from Christian principles.

Me: No, Christian principles were based around natural morality.

Person: *Engage cognitive dissonance mode*