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:

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

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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.