>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 >nothave achieved a state of being perfectly accurate.> In the above post, Lawrence then goes on to refer to humans and human altruism and does not bring in animals or other organisms. Here we may concede that human altruism may lie beyond the bounds of "altruism" in the animal kingdom (even if human altruism is a by-product of evolutionary processes of a kind explicable - up to a point - in Darwinian terms). However, it would not be "perfectly accurate" to think Lawrence previously confined himself to human altruism in this way - as the following shows: >The argument Wade presented in the previous notewas from Darwin’sDescent of >Manand not from hisOrigin of Species. As to the argument that “we need to reject the idea that behaviour that removes an organism from the gene-pool will be 'selected for' because it benefits the remaining group - this simply does not work as a theory, because nothing can be 'selected for' via its removal from the gene-pool.” That can’t be true. I’ve read several authors refer to organisms doing that very thing. One early author, can’t recall his name, referred to a pair of adult baboon males guarding their tribes passage up through a narrow passage where they would be safe for the night. The leopard came and they set upon it with precession. The leopard killed both of them, but before he did, one of them bit into the leopard’s jugular. > Here Lawrence clearly refers to baboons; and he argues that they are doing something that refutes the contention that “we need to reject the idea that behaviour that removes an organism from the gene-pool will be 'selected for' because it benefits the remaining group - this simply does not work as a theory, because nothing can be 'selected for' via its removal from the gene-pool.” Yet the baboons' example does nothing of the sort - not because Lawrence's "group selection" idea is "nonsense" but because it is false, for reasons explained in my posts. In the interests of clear communication, Lawrence should perhaps stick to humans and be clear he is sticking with them when talking of "group selection", for in this way he may be able to contend that he is talking about a kind of "altruism" that lies beyond Darwinian explanation. But once his comments stray so as to encompass "baboons" then he is talking of "group selection" where Darwinian principles apply - and here it can be explained that "kin selection" is what explains behaviour where organisms lose their lives in defence of others, not "group selection"; and this "kin selection" in no way refutes that "nothing can be 'selected for' via its removal from the gene-pool" but instead is an example of that basic Darwinian truth. Dnl Ldn On Monday, 26 May 2014, 20:52, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: Human altruism, the biological impact of which is not entirely clear 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 nothave achieved a state of being perfectly accurate. In the interest ofleaning towardcommunicating, 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 stillbe willing togive their lives for their tribe. And a tribe with young men who will give their livesfor 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 actualFaith Instinct,ifit 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 relativesinferringthat our more immediate ancestors were at least that far along in their morals. Lawrence