Quote:
Originally Posted by tore
We don't sacrifice ourselves for the good of the species. That concept has no intrinsic value in evolutionary biology. We do it for ourselves. We are our genes and our genes will be passed on to our children. By sacrificing for our children, we are also doing something for ourselves.
.. And that's generally the way we behave. What's interesting is that even though we perceive ourselves only as us; as a living expression of a particular constellation of genes, we act in the interest of our genes future survival.
And our genes survival is our own survival, just in more modular terms. We act as if we're people made up of lego. You want the bits you're made up of to go on to make up more people in the future; like your hair colour or a particular brain chemistry or funny looking toes .. and even if your child doesn't have the trait, the gene may be passed on and will be expressed again at some point. While we live for decades, our genes are, in a sense, billions of years old.
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How is doing something for your genes doing something for yourself? If sacrificing for your species doesn't make sense then sacrificing for your genes shouldn't either. Neither will help an individual person live on and sacrificing for either has a negative effect on you. What you're talking about sounds more like evolutionary psychology than evolutionary biology, and as far as I know evolutionary psychology borders on pseudo-science at this point.
I know you know vastly more on the subject than I do, so I'm not calling you out, just asking for clarification.