hackenslash wrote:Oh, and just sent a message to the The Week's webmaster:

Why are comments on articles not allowed? When I see intellect-free screeds like Damon Linker's wholly unresearched and idiotic 'Why atheism doesn’t have the upper hand over religion', containing, in one of the most hubristic challenges ever foisted on what is supposedly a decent news outlet, the dare 'Don't buy it? I dare you to come up with something better.', long after evolutionary theory has actually come up with something better and demonstrated its validity (kin selection), it really does require comment.

Any decent course in evolutionary biology requires the reading of certain seminal works, almost always containing Dawkins' 'The Selfish Gene', a book written to explain precisely what your idiot senior correspondent insists can't be answered other than by inventing imaginary friends.

Do you not require that your 'senior correspondents' actually do some research prior to evacuating their intellectual bowels in public in this manner?

Such ignorance requires response, especially when aimed at a specific group of people, and it is to your detriment that you don't allow me to expose the vacuousness of this stupid and worthless piece of polemic for what it is, and the abject ignorance of its author.

Poor show.

hackenslash wrote:There's not a law that says that, but there's something like an probabilistic law that says that those who do will, with a statistically significant weighting, send more genes into future generations

Will S wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:In a way, it does, Will. The reason Linker is up the creek is that he ignores the effect of sociality - kin selection. That makes it sometimes possible to improve your genes' survival by helping a close relative, even at your own expense.

No - you don't need kin selection theory, or any evolutionary account of altruism, to dismiss what the man claims. There's no evolutionary law which states that on each and every occasion an individual will act so as to maximise the probability of the survival of its own genes.

He seems to think that, because he has found one single contrary instance, there's something wrong with received evolutionary theory. That's just wrong.

DavidMcC wrote:

Will S wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:In a way, it does, Will. The reason Linker is up the creek is that he ignores the effect of sociality - kin selection. That makes it sometimes possible to improve your genes' survival by helping a close relative, even at your own expense.

No - you don't need kin selection theory, or any evolutionary account of altruism, to dismiss what the man claims. There's no evolutionary law which states that on each and every occasion an individual will act so as to maximise the probability of the survival of its own genes.

He seems to think that, because he has found one single contrary instance, there's something wrong with received evolutionary theory. That's just wrong.

True, but I was thinking more of the OP, which is specifically about altruism.