Evolutionary Determism of Altruism
Parabasis talks about a theories that evolutionary biologists have come up with to explain determined altruism.
Parabasis on the ‘Potlatch Effect’:
… you’re trying to destroy your enemies by engaging in a competition to outspend each other, using charity as the means to the end of their bankruptcy.
I share his skepticism of this theory. It does a messy job of explaining human behavior within the context of culture, because it seems to ignore ultimate causation of human culture.
Parabasis: We live in a cultural context, we are surrounded by various expectations, pressures etc. that have nothing to do with biology or genetics.
We do live in cultural contex; however, our culture most certainly has something to do biology, and our behavior is, at least impart, genetically determined. Our culture has evolved as surely as our genes and much of those two evolutionary histories overlap.
I would argue that much of what makes us human, biologically speaking, completely depends on the development of human society and culture. Without a larger human culture to support small family units, humans wouldn’t be able to grow and thrive. Indeed, human children are one of the most helpless young animals on the planet. But it’s because we have human society that allows for the long growth and nutrient availability that are crucial for the development of young human brains. This important fact has allowed us to evolve as the ecologically dominant animal in virtually every ecosystem on the planet.
Altruism cannot be explained without this context in mind.
Reciprocal altruism, AKA “I’ll stratch your back if you scratch mine” theory gives a reason that can explain why individuals that are not related to each other will still help each other out. This idea makes sense on an small basis, but that doesn’t fully explain on its own why an individual would donate to a charity ( for example) when that person would, in all likelyhood, never meet the person that money went to help.
The ‘Potlatch Effect’ doesn’t explain this type of small scale, secret altruism either.
However, when put into a context where we consider humans as large scale social cooperators, it does make sense; Altruism can be seen as developing not strictly from competition, but also from wide spread coercion.
Think about a group of cooperating humans, they can be related or not related, it doesn’t matter. A bully comes along and decides that he should be able to reap the benefits of the cooperating individuals, without paying any of the costs. The coorperaters have a choice; either they can reject the cheater and risk getting injured, if the cheater decides to impose his will anyway, or they can put up and shut up. In non-human animals, there’s a lot of risk associated with ostracizing a usually physically dominant cheater. Therefore, there is not much benefit to cooperating with non-kin. The risk of cheaters imposing is too high, therefore the costs of putting up with the cheaters is greater than the benefits of cooperating with non-kin.
However, in human animals, the cost of ostracising a cheater is low (relatively speaking). Even physically weak animals can express threat at a distance by merely picking up a bunch of rocks and driving the cheater away. Human animals are unique in that they have a precise throwing ability.
The ability to drive away cheaters makes cooperating with non-kin worthwhile. Reciprocal altruism has a way of being enforced and individuals who decide not to play along, to take and not give, are driven away.
This allows larger, non-kin social units to develop, allowing large scale and enforcable reciprocal altruism. This in turn, allows human babies to develop longer, under the protection of a larger society, which in turn allows for our ecological dominance.
This idea also explains how altruistic tendency arise not [only] from competition, but what is essentially forced cooperation. It makes sense, therefore, that animals genetically inclined to cooperate would have a better darwinian fitness and cheaters would die off, without passing on ‘extreme cheater’ genes. Therefore, both human culture and human genes dictate to us that altruism is the best way to go.
Unconscious reciprocal altruism can therefore be built into our genes and our culture in such a way so that even small scale anonymous donations to charities are explainable.
Obviously, human evolution has not so extreme as to develop a society full of hive-minded, social cooperators. Competition still plays a large role in invidual resource and mate allocation, but it is not enough to explain altruism, because competition does not fully explain how societies have evolved.
However, to say that genetics cannot explain altruism is missing the mark, because our genes have played a strong role in the development of society, and vice versa.
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March 17th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Again, I agree that punishment, in some form or another, is most certainly an important element of cooperative living. But I still think you’re putting too much emphasis on the cost of coercion being low in humans. Like I mentioned before, the threat of withdrawing from a cooperative relationship can in itself be punishment.
In fact, a rather good example of this can be found in fish. In the book “Cooperation among Animals: An Evolutionary Perspective”, the author Lee Alan Dugatkin summarizes research done on predator inspection in schooling fish. Predator inspection is when a small number of fish break off from the school to approach a potential predator. These inspectors then return to the school with information about that predator, better enabling them to protect against it. It was shown that schools with inspectors suffered less mortality than schools without them.
However, there is obviously an increased risk of predation in the act of inspecting. If two fish go out to inspect, one of them could cheat by lagging behind and just observing whether or not the leading fish gets eaten. However, the fish remember when inspecting partners cheat, and will subsequently lag behind themselves, or fail to inspect entirely. A decrease in inspection is costly as it increases the risk of predation. Inspectors, then, often form reciprocal relationships, and in females in particular it was found that they had preferred inspecting partners. Other studies found that guppies could form stable social networks through this and other mechanisms.
If guppies can accomplish this, I see no reason why humans cannot. In an earlier comment of yours, you mentioned that foreigners coming into a human group would not be in a recurring relationship and would have less incentive to cooperate without the threat of coercion. However, during human evolution, evidence suggests it’s far more likely that an incoming foreigner would not be welcome at all unless he’s going to integrate into the group. There is reason to believe our history was characterized by a lot of inter-group competition for territory and resources, and in such a conflict a higher degree of cooperation within the group is highly adaptive. To survive you need to work with your group members and work well; a lone individual probably stood little chance on their own, and ostracism from the group could have been devastating. This study:
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did some game theory testing to support the hypothesis that the evolution of out-group enmity could have gone hand-in-hand with in-group amity - in other words, cooperative living.
March 17th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
whoops - sorry about the size of that url. I didn’t realize it was so long.
March 17th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Apparently, I’m going to have to go look up some data that my prof. provided showing how significant remote vs. proximal killing is, in terms of the cost of coercion. I’ll have to get back to you on that one.
March 17th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
btw… in the guppies, what’s the mechanism by which other fish can recognize the inspector mates?
March 17th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
They have visually distinct and variable body markings, though I don’t know if it’s been determined if that’s how they recognize one another. But I would imagine that’s probably the main way.
March 18th, 2008 at 10:18 am
interesting post. thanks for the (more reasonable than what i had been reading) insight on the issue. i think what i was trying to say (and overstated) is just that simple genetic/biological/evolutionary explanations for complex things like human social behavior are always going to be somewhat unsatisfying and, as is the case for all simple answers to complex questions, self-serving.
Thanks!