[lit-ideas] Re: The Descent of Man and self-sacrifice
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 23 May 2014 23:11:03 +0200
Considering the child mortality rates until about the mid/19. century, even
fathering two or three children would hardly have guaranteed that one would
pass on the genes. (Particularly if the father was not around to take care
of them, because he had been killed in war.) Lawrence's self-sacrificing
heroes would have needed to do a lot of procreating to ensure that their
genes would remain in the pool.
On another note. Darwin's introduction of 'sexual selection' here is
perfectly understandable in the context of the Victorian English society in
which about a quarter of persons who reached adulthood never married, and
thus (given the prevailing customs) probably never procreated. There was
sexual selection going on to be sure, but I doubt that it was based on
dying abilities.
O.K.
On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 10:20 PM, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:
> Suicidal behaviors might be selected, consistently with the Darwinian view
> of evolution, if the members of the species who committed suicide had
> previously been able to procreate and pass their genes into the pool.
> Otherwise not. Darwin's Descent of Man also involves sexual selection, and
> if the men prepared to engage in suicidal behaviors had been chosen by
> women for mating over others, and impregnated at least one or more women,
> then they would be able to pass on their genes. This is a logical
> possibility, but I think that there is scant historical evidence that this
> has been the way it usually worked. Rather, historical evidence suggests
> that it has usually been the successful survivors of wars who were able to
> pass their genes on. (Particularly if they came back with their hands full
> of plunder.) Moreover, most of us are not inclined to suicidal behaviors,
> so that it doesn't seem likely that our genes were selected on that basis.
>
> O.K.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 10:01 PM, Lawrence Helm <
> lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> The argument Wade presented in the previous note was from Darwin’s*
>> Descent of Man* and not from his* Origin 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.
>>
>> I have read a number of similar accounts. The theory advanced to account
>> for this well-documented sort of thing is that while these baboons, for
>> example (and who knows, maybe their genes were passed into the tribes gene
>> pool before this event) were killed. The tribe, including the near
>> relatives of these baboons, lived on. They didn’t protect their own
>> genes, but they their genes, less any individual mutations would have
>> lived on in the tribe.
>>
>> Wade goes on to write that Darwin’s ideas were “developed by Edward O.
>> Wilson in his landmark 1975 book* Sociobiology* and extended from
>> animals to people. ‘The requirement for an evolutionary approach to
>> ethics is self-evident,’ he wrote.* Sociobiology*, though intended by
>> its author as merely a synthesis of new biological ideas, posed a political
>> challenge to Marxists and much of the academic left. It showed how the
>> human mind was not a blank slate, on which governments could write whatever
>> ideological prescriptions they wished in order to shape Socialist Man, but
>> was already shaped or predisposed by evolution to behave in certain
>> ways. Wilson’s book was assailed by Marxist colleagues at Harvard, such as
>> the geneticist Richard Lewontin. Students disrupted Wilson’s lectures and
>> harassed even Hamilton and Trivers. Researchers dared not use the word
>> sociobiology, even if they agreed with its ideas, lest they be caught up in
>> the furor. Sociobiology, as applied to people, is now pursued mostly under
>> the name of evolutionary psychology. Richard Alexander, after the storm
>> over Sociobiology had settled, was one of the first biologists to resume
>> the study of morality. Human ancestors lived in groups, he argued in a book
>> published in 1987, as a defense against other human groups, and warfare had
>> been a major influence in human evolution. Usually predators find it most
>> efficient to live in small groups (wolves, lions, killer whales) while
>> it is prey animals that congregate in large herds for defense. But humans
>> departed from this rule, probably because their most feared enemies were
>> other human groups. Incessant warfare led to selection for greater social
>> complexity and intelligence, and the larger societies required ever greater
>> self-constraint to avoid infringing on other individuals’ interests,
>> Alexander argued. “The function or raison d’ être of moral systems is
>> evidently to provide the unity required to enable the group to compete
>> successfully with other human groups. Only in humans is the major hostile
>> force of life composed of other groups in the same species,” he wrote.
>>
>> “The surprising idea that people might be inherently moral was difficult
>> for biologists and others to accept because it conflicted with the usual
>> assumption that human nature is selfish. Even harder to swallow, for those
>> not steeped in the concepts of evolutionary biology, was the assertion that
>> something as precious as morality could have blossomed from the murky soil
>> of strife and warfare.” [Wade, Nicholas (2009-10-27). The Faith
>> Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures (Kindle Locations 558-577).
>> Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.]
>>
>> Wade’s purpose isn’t primarily to show that an individual’s moral
>> instinct is sufficient to put the good of the pack above his own. Too
>> many examples of this exist for this to be questioned (at least by too many).
>> It is to demonstrate that we (and not just we but primates as well)
>> inherited a moral instinct. “In distress, they elicit sympathy with a
>> range of very human expressions. “When upset, chimpanzees pout, whimper,
>> yell, beg with outstretched hand, or impatiently shake both hands so that
>> the other will hurry and provide the calming contact so urgently needed,”
>> de Waal wrote. Chimps have been known to try to save others from drowning
>> in the moats that sometimes surround zoo colonies. This is a huge risk for
>> them because they cannot swim.” [Wade, Kindle Locations 593-597]
>>
>> “So what then is morality? De Waal’s definition, from his perspective as
>> a primatologist, is very different from that of rationalist philosophers.
>> “We understand morality as a sense of right and wrong that is born out of
>> group-wide systems of conflict management based on shared values,” he
>> writes. “Moral systems thus provide a set of rules and incentives to
>> resolve competition and conflicts within the group in the service of the
>> ‘greater good,’ that is, benefits (to individuals) derived from resource
>> distribution and collective action. Morality, by this definition, is
>> closely related to social behavior.” By breaking out of the specialist
>> frameworks in which philosophers and psychologists had long imprisoned the
>> study of morality, De Waal established that morality is a biological
>> behavior and that evolution is the only framework in which the origins
>> of morality can be addressed. [Wade, Kindle Locations 607-614]
>>
>> Lawrence
>>
>
>
Other related posts:
