One thing to remember about kin selection. Kin selection is all very well, but we have to remember the mechanisms whereby organisms recognize their kin, in order to behave altruistically to them. Organisms don't have "kin detector" organs, they have to use various proxies. So, there is a very good chance that these behaviors can be mistaken, or spoofed, or be overly broad or overly narrow. So, it may be that an animal recognizes kin by chemical signals. Ants do this...but some beetles can mimic those chemical signals. The beetles move into the anthill, and the ants feed them and care for them, even while the beetles happily munch down ant larvae. Or, imagine a group of primates. The primates attempt to behave altruistically towards their kin, but they recognize "kin" as a monkey that was born in their social group. Most of the time this will be a very effective proxy for kinship...the members of your band are almost certainly going to be closely related to you. But you don't have a sophisticated algorithm to calculate that relatedness, you just behave a certain way towards all members of your group and hope for the best. Now, some relationships like mother-child are obviously going to be different. But the point is that kin-recognition systems don't have to be very robust...they just have to work pretty well most of the time. And humans are the same. We behave altruistically towards "kin", but we use pretty rough and unrobust methods for determining who our kin is and who isn't. Humans often adopt children, and adopted siblings will treat each other pretty much as regular siblings. People in our close social groups are treated pretty much like distant relatives. Our kin-detection software treats them like 2nd cousins, or suchlike. But then we come to the real monkeywrench (so to speak) of human altruism...reciprocal altruism. Since humans have such sophisticated methods of recognizing individual humans, it is possible to remember which humans are nice and which humans are jerks. And a human can be nice to the other nice humans and a jerk to the jerk humans. And when this system of reciprocal altruism is codified, worked on, and made into a finely tuned system then amazing things are possible. I tend to agree with Dan that the "default morality" of Homo sapiens includes rape, murder, slavery, robbery, all that bad stuff. And that these techniques work quite well in increasing your fitness. But we humans have made some interesting discoveries. If we refrain from robbing, raping and murder, then all sorts of new social opportunities present themselves. We can increase the production of food and goods several orders of magnitude. We can increase our personal safety by orders of magnitude. We can share knowledge and protect ourselves against disease, starvation, and natural disasters. So, our "modern" system of morality is not based on "natural" morality. It is based on practicality. It is ultimately based on disregarding what natural selection has taught us to instinctively believe works. We have to work at stopping ourselves from doing those things, because we want to reap the rewards that tend to come our way if we live in a society where those things don't take place. And of course there will always be "cheaters", people who grab for the short term advantage of defecting in the iterated prisoner's dilemna. But, since people are selfish, many can be taught how to forego the short-term gains of instinctual behavior and go for the *really* big scores possible in our modern civilization. ===== Darryl Think Galactically -- Act Terrestrially __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email alerts & NEW webcam video instant messaging with Yahoo! Messenger http://im.yahoo.com
