[lit-ideas] Human altruism, the biological impact of which is not entirely clear
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 26 May 2014 12:51:59 -0700
In quoting from Cochran and Harpending, I got so many figurative “blank stares”
that I didn’t respond to all of them. So if someone is harboring a conviction
based upon the supposition that I said something that is nonsense, they may not
have achieved a state of being perfectly accurate.
In the interest of leaning toward communicating, I will say that young soldiers
who have never introduced a thing into a tribe’s gene pool (although they are a
reflection of it which ought to count for something) will still be willing to
give their lives for their tribe. And a tribe with young men who will give
their lives for it will survive longer than a tribe whose young men won’t.
Actually, there was probably never a tribe whose young men wouldn’t; so we
could expand and say the tribe whose young men more effectively fought for
their tribe without reference to their lives would survive better than the
tribe whose young men were not so effective. Now whether someone can “rebut”
me and say that I am saying that there is a process at work which selects a
non-input into the gene pool or such like, I say “pshaw.” Nevertheless what I
said before the “pshaw” sentence is so patently obvious (I would have thought)
that I find it hard to think anyone would doubt it. I myself enlisted in the
Marine Corps, during a war, when I was 17. As it happened I survived that war
and eventually contributed to the gene pool. Having kids (which was the way we
talked back then) didn’t affect (I am quite sure) my ability to be an effective
Marine
For the most part, however, that “survival of the fittest tribe” would have
occurred during our “hunter-gatherer” days which is before the period Cochran
and Harpending were writing about. Some of what they argued had to do with
whether 10,000 years were enough for major changes to have occurred. The
actual Faith Instinct, if it exists and I find Nicholas Wade’s arguments
persuasive, took far longer. He spends the early part of his book describing
what can be seen as primitive morals in our simian relatives inferring that our
more immediate ancestors were at least that far along in their morals.
Lawrence
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