before we understood genetics we understood altruism on an individual level. it is making a decision that might not be optimal for you yourself as an agent for the benefit of someone else.

once we discovered more about evolution and genetics we were able to deduce that all of our actions and programming have to be intrinsically selfish. that is, they have to work for the benefit of themselves. but they don't necessarily have to benefit the individual organism that they inhabit. and that is where the leeway for altruism comes in. you can have an organism sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the genetic lineage. that is basically sacrifice with no reward for that individual organism.

Whether ot not altruism exists is, to me, mostly interesting in the realm of behavioural ecology; to explain why we behave like we do. And then I prefer terms like reciprocal kindness or sexual selection or kin selection or what have you because they help explain the (selfish) mechanism which drives the evolution of the behaviour. Altruism as a term is not very explanatory and does not really drive the evolution of behaviours. I mean sure, you could look at a sacrificial behaviour evolving, but unless you've found it already, you're probably looking for the real selfish motivation behind it. After all, if it really was altruistic, natural selection should work against it.

Whether or not that's what you mean, it sounds like you're suggesting that genes and the cells that make up the organism really on different logic than the organism itself. Your consciousness is really just the emergent process of all of these smaller parts working together in order to better acquire resources. It's likely that the entire reason "you" even exist is to basically work as a slave in order sustain them, just as a cell does for it's organelles (not to mention vice versa). I imagine the logic that drives you to perform "altruistic" acts is governed by that basic directive.

I also imagine human societies works for the benefit of individual humans in much the same way and operate by the same rules that govern an individual human's relationship to the cells that make up his body (making a society or a species sort of like it's own singular organism). So if a human were to sacrifice himself "altruistically" for the benefit of the larger human species, it would be the same mechanism as a cell that dies when the body restricts blood flow during hypothermia. The cell isn't being altruistic, it's just operating in the way that evolution has deemed will maximize survival for the greater organism.

Alright, that's probably my contribution to the thread. You all am smarter than me and I'm just praying that that all made sense.

have you ever read the selfish gene?

Heard of it, but I've not read it.

It made perfect sense, and I pretty much agree with it, acknowledging the difference in semantics. Altruism is a useful word when asking "why is this cell/organism sacrificing itself for the greater good?". We may find that it doesn't match our idealistic vision of altruism, but the word kind of stuck around in the biology literature:

JSTOR: An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie

The Unit of Selection in Viscous Populations and the Evolution of Altruism

An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie

Note also, that the evolutionary biology definition is:

"in evolutionary biology, an organism is said to behave altruistically when its behaviour benefits other organisms, at a cost to itself. The costs and benefits are measured in terms of reproductive fitness, or expected number of offspring. So by behaving altruistically, an organism reduces the number of offspring it is likely to produce itself, but boosts the number that other organisms are likely to produce."

Biological Altruism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

So here we have an example where it's explicitly not about passing your own genes on, but helping other members of your species pass their genes on (unless you consider long term effects of kin selection, I guess). Anyway, this is distinct from the way other biological papers i linked above define it... so even in the field of biology, different subfields define it differently.

The easiest way to get over such semantic ambiguity is to call each kind of altruism by a different label: idealistic altruism vs. evolutionary altruism, etc.

Nice job Batlord, you basically expanded on my points with your penchant for greater wordiness and I commend you for it.

maybe give it a look over. that's basically where i'm coming from. altruism exists between organisms. typically we see organisms act in their own self interest, but in some special cases they make sacrifices for other organisms. genes, on the other hand, are selfish by definition. because they are at the actual level where selection takes place. there is no incentive for a gene to ever make a sacrifice, but there can be for the organism because of the gene. it's not different logic for genes and cells. it's just a matter of the scope of what you are looking at. if someone does something altruistic it is a sacrifice they make as an individual because they have been programmed to do so. the same holds for pretty much everything we do. the only real distinction that has ever been made in terms of altruism is at the human/animal level, not the genetic level.

How come no one has pointed out that altruistic acts exisit
in the form of parents and their offspring?

Do I need to point out we as humans have the desire to sacrfice ourselves, our stuff, or what have you,for the greater good of our children...cough* Just my opinion though. .

That's about as clear a case of evolutionary programming causing us to act in a way that perpetuates the species at our own expense as I can think of.

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.

I would still argue that it's not necissary we even do it for ourselves. We just do it. We often come up with reasons why we do things later, and different people have different motivations, but all that matters in terms of evolution is that we do it, not that we develop a reasonable argument for why. That's more of a thing that society expects of us to explain our behavior.

Re: ancient genes. Since we (ducks, chickens, spiders, you, and me) can all be traced back to a single ancestor, you can think of your life and experiences as a very small chain in a very long lasting and pervasive process. I always found that to be pretty cool.

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.

you have to think about how natural selection works. genes are selected in a population based on success. if you are willing to sacrifice yourself for someone who shares a certain gene with you, then that gene can benefit more than if you always act selfishly in that case. think of a parent willing to sacrifice for their children. they can have multiple children that can potentially benefit from this instinct and those children can have a greater change to pass on that gene in even greater numbers. the same doesn't hold true for an instinct to sacrifice for the good of 'the species'. any one particular 'gene' might not benefit from this instinct and so there's no selective pressure for such a gene to develop.

i do disagree with tore that a person is simply their genes and that any given gene's interest is that person's interest. this denies a human being their agency. to counter this point i will offer a simple example. say i have no children and i decide to sterilize myself because i feel having kids would impede on my career/happiness/whatever. am i acting in my own self interest in this case? by the logic that my interests should always necessarily correlate with that of my genes you would have to say no. and yet clearly i have other priorities which are important to me that i am seeking out and so i would say that it only really makes sense from an individual perspective to say yes.

But the reason human society evolved in the first place is because it increases survival odds, which makes it more likely that you'll pass your genes on. Meaning that genes that encourage social cooperation should get passed on. It seems like the same basic evolutionary mechanism to me.

You are right. Our interests that look after our genes of course work at a very basic level. You know this already of course, but your want for sex is a powerful expression of a feeling which will motivate you into perpetuating your genes.

There could be more subtle motivations - you might regret your decision to sterilize yourself in the future, and that could be an influence of genes, directly for a programmed want for children or indirectly through some other social function f.ex, but it would be hard to trace the origin of every notion. Either way, the sum of our behaviours generally lead to children and that generally happens as a result of us doing what we want.

This is what I meant by how our viewpoint is from that of us as unique constellations. We see our needs as selves, but we generally (though not always) act for the betterment of the bits we're made up of. It's an interesting duality of life.

This is all true, Batlord. Humans have evolved to become more social over time because cooperating with others is a great way to ensure your own genes survival (not necessarily the species).

For a silly example about the species view of evolution, let's say we have a tiny population of two households, yours and your neighbour's. You are super nice and your neighbor is super selfish. You two are not related, so there's no kin selection. You are so nice that you give away resources to your neighbour and your neighbour is so selfish he doesn't reciprocate. Your efforts help to bring his selfish genes on and your own genes suffer from it. In the end, only his genes survive in the population.

He's the same species as you, but what value does that have? The answer is basically none. If he's not related to you and does not return the kindness, then by helping your fellow species member, you are actually turning yourself into an evolutionary dead-end. Hence, that behaviour wouldn't evolve, but would get weeded out by natural selection like in the example above.

When you get right down to it, it's a simple matter of cause and consequence. It is superbly formulated in the book The Selfish Gene mentioned by HWB and I think you'd probably love it :)