"Then you might say what about orphans or donating people to the sick and hungry? Then I'd say, as has been mentioned before, we evolved during a time when there were no orphanages or infomercials about starving people far away. The people around you were probably closely related to you and people whom your very existence depended on in a big way. When your genes look at a person who is in a bad place, their kneejerk reaction is probably that this person is a part of that group of people in which you have an "I scratch your back, you scratch mine" sort of relationship with. Modern society or parts of it haven't been around long enough for us to be adapted to it in a real fitness-calculating way"
Which, I believe, would make it an exaption if that were the case. I don't see how what you're saying conflicts with my point.
You and I have a different paradigm too. You talk about traits being specifically selected for and serving functions. If you consider the other half, environment (where selection happens) the genes are more of a library and the "higher order" system (gene regulatory systems that decide what genes are expressed and when and for how long) are really the place to look at where the biological system is interpreting and responding to its environment using its library of genes. In this paradigm, there are no "gay genes" or "altruistic genes" that selected for, there's versatile genes that can be expressed to varying degree in a population and can serve to diversify social function In an dynamic manner - how humans deine and pick out thesee functions causes some loss of generality (we're forced to map territories we haven't been to, to talk about the ones we have). Of course, genetic variety will also contribute to social roles, but this broader reach of altruism over longer distances of relatedness has left a lot of people "artificially selected" (if you consider human selection non-natural... kind of getting into confusing the map with the territory at that point though). And I do think there's lots of evidence in the nature of our facial processing structures in our brain (which are distinct from other visual processing structures) and cooperation between tribes provided a benefit in many cases (knowing when to cooperate and when to compete is the superior trait, so an adaptive library would be more fit than a fixed library).
I'm on my phone so forgive the formatting and penmanship ship.
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