Allan Miller wrote:Altruism is a different kettle of fish. But again, I'm not sure we need to assume that altruistic behaviour is somehow wired into our genes from some adaptive benefit realised in our Pleistocene past.

I think the problem with these arguments is that altruism is not what is wired into the genes. It's a word for a complex behavior that we have come up with. What I think is wired into our brains is 'tendencies' toward certain behaviors. Altruism is probably a mix of child nurture gone wild and certain risk aversion tendencies that make it wiser for a mammal to submit or cooperate than to fight. This is all done with the wiring bundles and how they connect and how they tend to flare out and overlap at each end. Also the gradation of neurotransmitters and receptors across different areas of the cortex.

A combination of things resulted in groups that flocked together to some advantage. I think these groups must have been small and strongly interbred so I don't see the problem with kin vs. altruism. It was both. The idea that a selfish individual would breed to advantage is one that surprises me. Like I say we kill people like that in Texas every day. Sociopaths keep popping up and they keep failing to take over the gene pool. My guess is that they would not necessarily be good breeders and it is likely that there is no selfish sociopath gene either.

I think this is a non-starter. Everything that evolved and is alive today has a highly complex story. Picking one so-called trait and fighting about it indicates to me that two people have an opinion about something that doesn't have enough detail to model it mathematically. So I can't pick a side.

But I don't know enough about this field so...

SpeedOfSound wrote:I consider lion packs altruism.

The lionesses in a group are the markedly altruistic ones, and they tend to be closely related.

SpeedOfSound wrote:
In your philosophy thread logical bob was talking about running into burning buildings. If a genome developed that caused us to do this on a daily basis I'm guessing it wouldn't last long unless it were a long rainy period. For the most part our altruism is a careful and calculated affair. Still it IS a factor in our makeup and it does feel good to help others. I do not buy that feeling good is a result of learned behaviors or culture. Not at it's root.

My best guess is that males somehow got a chunk of child nurture from the female and then this became diffuse or imprecise in it's application. For a guy that fucks around a lot it might be genetically beneficial to treat every kid in the village.

I think too that the basis of nurturing our kin to the degree required to support the larger brain is hopelessly in- differentiable from the basis of treating others in our group. This is quite obvious if you look at history and even the present. If we can be sure that we are not related or tied economically to any other living thing we seem to get onto rape and pillage and murder right fast.

Yes, there does seem to be a good deal of spontaneous rather than calculated altruism towards non-relatives in one’s own group. To what extent does it depend on a level of expected altruism? If someone helps others in a group and finds that the others are not offering each other so much help, the altruist is likely to readjust their helping behaviour to fit the group norm – so that the calculation comes in giving help at roughly the level one is likely to receive it? Whereas relatives are helped on a less conditional basis? I’m guessing. As you say, the altruism often doesn’t extend beyond the group.

SpeedOfSound wrote:
So if the argument is that a gene developed that made us always throw ourselves in front of trucks every time an opportunity presented itself then this whole thing is just silly.

I think the argument is that humans are extra good at calculating exactly when to be altruistic and when not to be, and that we do it in a way that, on balance, helps relatives more than non-relatives.

SpeedOfSound wrote:
I'm not sure what you were saying about machines above. I was talking about building complex models that account for these complex details.

I think the more complex models tend to be discussed by sociologists; I don’t know much about them, I’m still stuck at the basic level of how the human level of apparent altruism is compatible with reductionism, the accepted theory that humans evolved through natural selection.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

zoon wrote:Zoon wrote:...
the definition of altruists in evolutionary studies is that they help others and also, because of the helping, reproduce less than non-altruists would in the same circumstances.

That sounds more like a 'stupid' gene than altruism.

Yes, a gene for altruism would be stupid if it wasn’t helping copies of itself in other individuals, usually relatives. If it’s helping non-relatives, or individuals who are not more likely to have copies of itself, then it’s a stupid gene, full stop, and will disappear from the gene pool. This is why human altruism when it is directed to non-relatives is a puzzle. The answer (for kin selectionists) is that human altruism towards non-relatives is usually within a group that includes a higher proportion of the altruist’s relatives, and so natural selection keeps the behaviour instead of weeding it out. Group selectionists like E.O. Wilson and David Wilson object to the kin-selectionists’ implication that we are nepotistic and calculating, and I think many people would agree with them – I gather you do, and I’m not sure I like kin selection either, but I don’t think we can get away from it. I’m not at all convinced by the idea that some gene appeared during a population bottleneck and has been causing everyone to go against their genetic interests ever since.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

Allan Miller wrote:Altruism is a different kettle of fish. But again, I'm not sure we need to assume that altruistic behaviour is somehow wired into our genes from some adaptive benefit realised in our Pleistocene past.

.......
I think this is a non-starter. Everything that evolved and is alive today has a highly complex story. Picking one so-called trait and fighting about it indicates to me that two people have an opinion about something that doesn't have enough detail to model it mathematically. So I can't pick a side.

My interest in this is that if kin selection is accepted as the driver of human cooperation (including altruism), this feels both counterintuitive and unacceptable, and I was wondering how far other people felt the same way. Probably the place for the question is in the philosophy forum. It is one of the difficult areas in the materialistic project of seeing humans in a woo-free manner.

It is noticeable that evolutionary biologists who write popular books on human evolution tend to deny kin selection for other mechanisms (e.g. memes, group selection, non-overlapping magisteria) which are not accepted by other evolutionary biologists.

-deleted-

zoon wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

zoon wrote:
Boyd et al wrote:
Over the next 5 to 10 million years something happened that caused humans to cooperate in large groups.

??? That's puzzling. What evidence is there that large unrelated groups appeared before 5-10,000 years ago?

The only hard evidence is that humans diverged from chimps 5-10 million years ago, chimps don’t have the capacity to cooperate in large unrelated groups and we do, so something must have happened in between. There is the evidence about modern hunter-gatherers which Boyd mentioned: they live in small groups because otherwise they run out of food, but the groups cooperate across wider networks. Also, it would be even more unexpected if humans developed such an unusual biological trait in only a few generations.

There's an interesting point in this.

Consider neighbouring chimpanzee groups. In chimpanzees females move to a new group to breed when they reach puberty. Males stay for life in their natal group. Males in one group are always strangers to males in another group. Females can know individuals from two or more groups.

Because females move between groups to breed - and in pretty much all species one or both sexes moves to a new group to breed - a male chimpanzee in one group can have a nephew through his brother in his own group and a nephew through his sister in a neighbouring group but one will be a familiar co-resident ally and the other will be a stranger and potential enemy.

What happened in our ancestry is that the previously unknown relatives in neighbouring groups became known - most likely through the females with the continuation of relations of females with two or more groups.

Interestingly, in bonobos when two neighbouring groups meet there can be - due to the high/maybe dominant status of females (and females travelling with males on the borders of territories rather than it only being males doing border patrols in chimpanzees) - friendly interactions between the groups. The female bonobos, who also leave their natal group when they reach puberty, are the links between the groups that reduces antagonism between the groups.

In our ancestry the known linking of groups through reproduction rather than simply the loss of natal females at puberty has been the way alliances between small groups could grow and grow.

Unfortunately for human females, this subsequently made our females commodities to be exchanged by males to create alliances with their preferred other males in other groups. And this led to greater male control of females in humans than in any other species in the self-interest of the males - but that's another story.

The point is that 'kin' exist in neighbouring groups of chimpanzees and humans and any social species. The difference for humans is that these kin can be known and relations continued even at a distance. The details of when and how this happened I don't know but I would think that it cetainly goes back well before 10000 years, possibly millions of years ago considering the elements of it in bonobos.

sprite wrote:

What happened in our ancestry is that the previously unknown relatives in neighbouring groups became known - most likely through the females with the continuation of relations of females with two or more groups.

[...]

In our ancestry the known linking of groups through reproduction rather than simply the loss of natal females at puberty has been the way alliances between small groups could grow and grow.

Personally, I'm dubious that kin recognition and amended behaviour towards kin are the issue in integration of separate ape groups. The mechanism of kin recognition seems to be who you were brought up near (which seems to underlie incest avoidance). Accurate offspring recognition seems to be entirely absent from our species - what's the latest figure on percentage of fathers rearing another's baby?

Once you have advanced communication and something to trade, I feel that this alone is sufficient to create an integration. Sadly, 'something to trade' can include females. Adaptive explanations require a genetic basis and a means by which that genetic trait translates into increased offspring. It's not clear that either condition is met in integration of proto-human groups. Subgroups trading effectively are likely to produce more offspring than isolationists, once they have reasoned through (or had explained) the benefits.

Allan Miller wrote:Personally, I'm dubious that kin recognition and amended behaviour towards kin are the issue in integration of separate ape groups.

But we do need to understand how the sometimes/often murderous nature of neighbouring male-male interactions in the other apes was changed for humans. Obviously the females do spend their breeding years amongst con-specifics they did not grow up with('non-kin'), though there may be other females from their natal group in their breeding group. So males in a group will have familiar individuals/'kin' within the otherwise neighbouring enemies/competitor group. And, of course, males gladly accept 'non-kin'/stranger/'enemy' females into their group for mating.
The basic act of reproduction is about strangers/non-kin, ie males and females, joining in the same group and cooperatively breeding etc. Kin selection has two non-kin individuals at its very root - the two strangers that mate.

I think what I'm trying to get to grips with is the idea that groups are ever genetically isolated from their neighbours when gene flow is, to me, inevitable. Even in more advanced times a defeated group would likely have had the females taken for breeding which then brings in the defeated group's 'inferior' genes into the gene pool of the winning group. My biggest problem with group selection is that the only real group boundary is that of the species as gene flow within that boundary is what keeps the species a species.

Allan Miller wrote: The mechanism of kin recognition seems to be who you were brought up near (which seems to underlie incest avoidance).

Yes, there is disagreement over whether pubescent individuals disperse to avoid incest or whether dispersal of individuals just incidentally has the consequence of avoiding incest but is due to other reasons. Certainly familiar individuals through childhood seems to turn off sexual interest.
It would be interesting to have genetic history of, say, chimpanzee groups to see if immigrating females (or their reproductive systems) reject mating (or sperm) from unfamiliar males who are equally or more genetically related than the males they have rejected in their natal group.
I suspect that female choice or cryptic choice acts to avoid sub-opimal sperm which would include that of closely genetically related males whether familiar or not. I suspect that solitary species have mechanisms for this and 'familiarity' cannot be involved in this instance. And as the costs of poor matings are carried more by females than males I suspect the mechanisms are much more strongly selected in females than in males.

Allan Miller wrote:Once you have advanced communication and something to trade, I feel that this alone is sufficient to create an integration.

Yes but you still have to get round the automatic aggression of the other ape males towards males of other groups. Only in bonobos is this aggression diluted because of the females enabling the transient mixing due to their familiarity with individuals across the two groups while the males are strangers to each other.

Just to add that

Primeval kinship: how pair-bonding gave birth to human society
By Bernard Chapais

provides, imo, the best coverage of how our ancestors evolved the links beyond the immediate residential group:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Iyul ... &q&f=false

Chapter 14 concerns the rise of the tribe, and male pacification as a prerequisite, and females as peacemakers.

Linda Stone (who I have also read and enjoyed a fair bit re. kinship) has a good review of the book:
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cac ... _3pNM-I4UA