The genetic cost of tyranny
We may feel sympathy when we read about people killed for protesting in Syria, Bahrain, Libya, and other countries. But tyranny isn’t just something happening to unfortunate people somewhere else. It’s an existential risk to human civilization.
Civilization—even tribalism—relies on altruism. Altruism is defined as cooperation that is not the happy convergence of interests of rational self-interested agents. That happens too; but we don’t call it altruism. Altruism is, roughly, helping others without the expectation of reciprocation or cooperation. And it happens because humans like helping other humans.
Altruism is probably mostly genetic. It’s an evolutionary adaptation that instills the desire to help others into a species. Social pressure can install some amount of altruism; but it’s my opinion that this would not work at all without a pre-existing genetic basis. Many species exhibit altruism to a level at least as great as that in humans. Some insects, which are incapable of feeling social pressure, are far more altruistic than humans.
Two theories for how this happens are kin selection and group selection. Regardless of which of these you prefer, both of them have two important weaknesses:
They are both very weak effects compared to selection for traits that benefit their organism directly.
They require special social conditions, on society size (on the order of 10 members per society in the case of kin selection) and immigration/emigration rate (extremely low in both cases).
It’s not known whether humans are still evolving, or have begun devolving due to lack of selective pressure. But in the case of altruism, we can be sure: Even if some selective pressure still exists, most humans today do not live under the necessary conditions for either kin selection or group selection. Humans are living off their evolutionary capital of altruism.
Tyranny, whether it’s that of Syria, Iran, North Korea, Nazi Germany, or the Soviet bloc under Stalin, aggressively selects against altruism. The most-altruistic people were among the first executed in all those places. They are the people being shot while protesting in Syria. Social activism under such a government is rarely in your best self-interest. Tyranny selects for self-interest; people who are willing to help the state oppress others are given opportunities for advancement. And it removes altruistic genes quickly from the population, likely undoing hundreds of years of evolution every year. Those genes will never be replaced.
I’m not too worried when this occurs over a few short months or years. But when a people lives under these conditions for generations, you may end up with a large population deficient in altruistic genes.
There’s no solution at that point short of gene therapy. The population can stay in place, resulting in a society that is at best hopelessly mired in corruption and poverty, and at worst a danger to the rest of the world. Or it can disperse, and dilute altruistic genes around the globe.
ADDED: Knowing whether this is a real problem or not, would require learning something about how many genes are involved in altruism, and what their distribution in the population is. A legitimate objection to what I wrote is that if genes for altruism are distributed so that killing less than 1% of the population would have a major impact on their abundance, then they probably weren’t very important to begin with. Although, sociopaths are only around 1% of the population, and they have a major impact on society. I wonder how much work has been done in studying the maintenance of alleles for which you only need a few members of the population to have them?
What support do you have for this claim? Do you have specific knowledge about the history of each of these regimes, or are you writing based on vague stereotypes?
(It takes a very extraordinary level of historical knowledge and understanding—far beyond mere detailed knowledge of names, places, and dates—to discuss such things meaningfully.)
Indeed, thinking of these systems I find it perfectly plausible the majority of altruist intentions where successfully channelled and employed by the regimes in question.
Also wouldn’t the term authoritarian be better? Syria and Iran don’t really compare to North Korea.
Most of the time, I find this term devoid of any real meaning. It’s an ideological term of opprobrium, which gives little or no useful information about the structures of authority in the society to which it is applied. It merely communicates that the speaker disapproves of them for ideological reasons. In particular, the academic usage of this term, from Adorno till present day, has been mired in ideological nonsense so badly that I really think the term is better left unused.
You are certainly right that it makes no sense to conflate various mildly and moderately repressive regimes with the greatest extremes like North Korea or Stalin’s USSR under the “totalitarian” label. On the other hand, as long as it’s not diluted by overuse, this label makes more sense than the vague and ideologized “authoritarian” one.
Using terms like evolution and devolution implies there is a purposeful direction in evolution, and ‘devolution’ is change against that direction. “Devolution” is evolution, just evolution due to a different set of selection pressures.
The lack of selection pressure wouldn’t result in “devolution” but rather a lack of change in the frequencies of genes.
Even in the absence of selection pressure, Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium only holds in an infinitely large population with no mutation. So I think no.
In a real population with no selection pressure, you would expect to see allele frequencies change somewhat more frequently than they do in a population undergoing adaptive evolution—google “neutral theory”.
I have previously spelled out the case for using “devolution” in Phil’s sense here:
http://alife.co.uk/essays/devolution/
Using the term “devolution” does not imply that there is a purposeful direction in evolution. It just recognises that adaptive peaks give the fitness landscape a sense of “up” and “down”. Adaptive evolution refers to hill climbing and “devolution” refers to going downhill.
I disagree. The introduction of random, non-adaptive mutations is more meaningfully called devolution than “evolution due to a different set of selection pressures.” It is not due to selection pressures. “Devolution” means that deleterious mutations are accumulating faster than they are selected against.
They are deleterious only as judged by our value system, they are adaptive for the organism. Please note that “adaptive” and even “deleterious” have technical or semi technical meanings as well as the more “common sense” ones.
Artificial lifeforms like the use employed explicitly clarified thank you very much.
Note: Retracted. Seems I was a sloppy reader. See comments below.
No—look, evolution is the fixation of random mutations. Most mutations are not adaptive! The vast majority are either neutral, or destructive, often rendering a protein nonfunctional.
When selective pressure is high, bad mutations are eliminated, and good mutations increase in frequency. When selective pressure is low, bad mutations are introduced much faster than good mutations.
You can’t simultaneously believe in evolution, and not believe in devolution, unless you have a mystical view of evolution as something that magically always adapts.
Huh?
Er, you can if you define devolution the way they do here).
The point is that this is bad terminology—a waste of a perfectly useful term.
The term “devolution” should obviously be being used to refer to this.
I don’t have any real disagreements with the points you make there, but I do think this statement could mislead some:
Loss of complexity can certainly be adaptive too, as I think you acknowledge here:
Also, interesting to note that one cave fish, Astyanax, seems to have lost its eyes not to conserve energy, but because of pleiotropy: the same genes used in eye development are also involved in other traits, like sense of taste, and mutations which produce improvements in taste simultaneously change eye development. It’s hazardous to talk about the fuction of something before you know how it’s made!
Ah I see the source of the misunderstanding. I was fixating on altruism and its adaptive value of lack of there of, in my mind I was challenging characterising the reduction of altruistic behaviour as devolution.
You however where speaking generally of human devolution and even defining the concept for the reader’s benefit!
You are of course right.
If I could sleep I would excuse myself as staying up way to late in this time zone. However I can’t do that. Please accept a delicious slice of cake as apology.
Presumably it’s just the sort of thing GLaDOS says every so often#GLaDOS).
You are kidding me. Did you just say that mutations-reaching-fixation-we-know-they-weren’t-selected-for should be classed as mutations-reaching-fixation-and-adaptive-for-the-organism? That has got to be the dumbest thing… [head explosion].
But low capacity for altruism is selected for in the environment discussed.
Any genetic change due to selection (I doubt nature makes the pretty distinction between natural and artificial selection as clearly as we do) that eliminates an undesired trait or characteristic is basically by definition adaptive and not deleterious (as in harmful, injurious to the organism).
Edit: Why the delete? You’re making Caroline sad.
Gordon Tullock has argued that revolutionary activism is rational, even for non-altruistic agents, because participants benefit individually by gaining visibility and signaling loyalty to the new government. The recent revolutions in Arab countries seem to fit this model.
I was excited when I read your comment, because I imagined it linked to some analysis of costs and benefits.
Gordon Tullock’s 1971 paper sounds interesting, and is thinking along the same lines that I am here, and I’m upvoting your comment for bringing it to my attention.
But, the point about the recent revolutions in Arab countries says nothing beyond that Mohamed Ghannouchi, who was to lead the Tunisian unity government, was in Ben Ali’s government. This is only about Tunisia, not about “the recent revolutions (plural) in Arab countries”; it isn’t an analysis; and it doesn’t even make sense—Mohamed Ghannouchi wasn’t a participant in the Tunisian uprising; he was a casualty of it. He was the Prime Minister before the uprising, and was forced to resign because of it.
An interesting and sobering thought. [upvoted]
However, one might ask whether totalitarian regimes actually kill enough people, and whether the selection for altruistic individuals, is enough to make a difference.
To talk about specifics:
My sense is that in many regimes, people are killed for reasons that have little to do with altruistic behavior. I would not take for granted that people sent to death camps in Germany, or Gulags in the USSR, were sent there because of altruistic behavior. My impression is that the preponderant fraction of people killed were chosen because of their religious/class/ideology/ethnic identity made them suspect. Is there reason to think that, say, Trotskyites were more likely to be altruistic, or otherwise had interesting genetic differences?
Except perhaps Cambodia and North Korea, my impression is that the total number of people killed was less than 10% of the population—is that likely to have significant genetic consequences?
I would think that memetic pressure would be more significant than genetic pressure. It would be interesting to know whether murdering ideological non-conformists in generation N limits the willingness of members of generation N+ 3 to air public criticisms of the status quo. A hard hypothesis to test, unfortunately, due to there being many confounding effects.
That depends on the number of alleles involved. The more alleles that are involved, the more it’s possible for them to be concentrated in a small number of individuals by chance.
I think you’re probably right—if these genes were strongly manifested in less than 10% of the population, then maybe they aren’t critical to society. (That’s an empirical question.)
One place to look would be criticisms of eugenics. If eugenics wouldn’t work because there aren’t a high-enough fraction of the population’s deleterious alleles in the bottom 1% (by some measure) of the population, then by the mirror image of that argument, selecting against altruism also wouldn’t “succeed”.
Maybe, but it’s less permanent, so less of a worry to me.
What if those who rebel are not more altruistic than those who don’t? (In some cases, they could be terrorists trying to violently overthrow the government for personal gain, and there are plenty of intermediate cases. In all cases they think they’re altruists).
What if those the government kills are not particularly altruistic? (see for example the Cultural Revolution in China, whose rethoric was very much anti-selfishness)
What if there are other traits “orthogonal” to altruism, and where rebels tend to have the “worse” variant (less docility, more aggressivity, more violence, etc.)
What if the variance in altruism is cultural rather than genetic in origin? (even if altruism is “mostly genetic”, that doesn’t say much about the source variance in the population. There could be a hard-wired altruistic drives that exists in everybody, and minor cultural variations that explain all of the variance)
Really? I tend to follow the Smithian view that justice is what civilization relies on, and then any generosity above that is icing on the cake.
Three generations of selection pressure didn’t turn Russians into communists. I wouldn’t be too worried.
Interesting take. Upvoted.
You might be interested in this paper by Peter Frost:
The Roman State and Genetic pacification
Makes for interesting speculation. In any case it seems to me that greater conformity is a more likley measurable product of a totalitarian state. In a sense the totalitarian state speeds up some of the processes of self-domestication.
I think differential birth rates between “altruists” and “non-altruists” have much more impact than more “altruistic” people dying. Also I think its probably more of a general unfortunate effect of living in a a urban civilized society than something just limited to totalitarian societies.
Can you elaborate on that?
Altruism is a product of kin selection. It seems safe to say that group selection is far too weak to account for it. What are the conditions under which altruism that can easily be diverted to non kin can survive?
While it sounds plausible and perhaps likley I’m not convinced that urban environments are overall places where kin selection can’t work as well, consider for example the endogamous situations one sees in societies with caste systems or more clan based structures, where people both economically and reproductively closely cooperate with their kin.
But I do think that it is likley that in modern society kin selection is basically broken, and may have been broken since the industrial revolution. Perhaps similar conditions could be found in other societies?
I think you are right concerning urban environments. We have plenty of examples of societies where the urban environment is very clannish. How well you do is closely tied to how well your extended family does and you also select mates from that family.
To quote from pg. 84 of The Natural history of Inbreeding and Outbreeding:
But societies that are very inbreed don’t seem to be very “altruistic” in the way the word is used on LW. They seem to be altruistic towards family members but not very much to random strangers. Or it might just be that the well known effect of inbreeding depressing IQs might make their societies more impoverished and thus leaves them less able to help random strangers.
This brings me to three interesting interesting predictions one might make. All else being equal:
1) Societies with a longer history of faster travel tend to be more indiscriminately altruistic (since that presumably means more out-breeding).
2) Societies where the cost of travel over long distances is low will have less inbreeding.
3) Subcultures that maintain high inbreeding despite exposure to 1) and 2) out-compete those groups in a society that don’t, because they enjoy the fitness boost of indiscriminate altruists while being highly selective about who is the target of their own altruism.
I do not have a high confidence in these but they seem to make sense.
Why not just more selfish?
I didn’t mean to imply that the “overall level” of altruism would remain the same, just that remaining altruist impulses would be distributed less selectively by an individual. If I said a certain society has a more equal distribution of wealth I wouldn’t wish to imply they overall also have more wealth per capita. The word indiscriminately was probably not an optimal choice, but I wanted to avoid the warm glow associated with words like “equally”, “egalitarian” or “less discriminating”.
In an inbreed society you are more closely related (as in likley to have a greater overlap of genes) to your spouse and consequently your children than otherwise. The relative advantage of you being extra altruistic to them, compared to most other less related people, seems greater than it would be in a outbred one. So if I was speculating on how altruism is directed in such a society I’d expect it to drop more sharply when going from me>brothers>cousin>clan member>tribe>ect., because the fitness differences are more pronounced.
Say I have 0.9 Ghandi, and I distribute it 0.5 to my family 0.3 to my tribe and 0.1 to the default human who isn’t part of my tribe. If I shift this to 0.4 to my family, 0.3 to my tribe and 0.2 to default human who isn’t part of my tribe, this may obviously result in fewer people actually helping each other, because diminishing returns would kick in. What it may also do is for example make coordination on the tribal or even trans-tribal level easier, which can lead to certain tragedy of the commons situations being averted that otherwise wouldn’t have.
I want to however strongly emphasise:
Right, for relative strangers in an outbreed society the pay-offs for altruism between them is more favourable than in a more inbreed society.
What I find interesting is that you could get there in several ways, for example you could tweak your tendency to categorise people in outgroup vs. ingroup to make them more likley to classify people in the former, while decreasing how much you want to help any individual of the ingroup. Or you could just tweak up the altruism for outgroup. Actually thinking a bit more about this I’m not sure there is any real difference between the two approaches.
Those people on the streets are probably more courageous, and less tolerant of injustice than the general population. Also, they are probably better-informed and feel more desperate. None of these traits and circumstances has much to do with altruism.
Yes—but there are more theories when dealing with social creatures. Reciprocal altrusim is well known.
There’s also the idea that memes promote human ultrasociality by pushing humans into close proximity with each other, so the memes can infect new hosts. For more on that hypothesis, see:
My Memes and the evolution of human ultrasociality
Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation
A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution
The Meme Machine
That’s an interesting idea.
For more on the topic, perhaps see the references of my Memes and the evolution of human ultrasociality.
A similar critique could and has in the past been made of the Catholic church. I guess it depends on what traits individuals who where most likley to take celibacy seriously had.
I’ve heard that many priests were the third sons of nobility—the first son inherits, the second goes into the military, the third into the priesthood. If so, it couldn’t do too much culling. But I am skeptical that there were enough noblemen’s third sons to supply Europe with priests.
I think it was also to some extent the profession of choice for smarter than average children of the middle/lower classes, they would probably end in the low ranking positions while the third sons filled out the top. If this is true then we needn’t worry to much about running out of altruism from it, but it may have cost us a bit of intelligence.
From what I’ve seen and read, most protests begin for economic reasons (commonly inflation) and become political only once they gain critical mass and groups with explicit political views join in. This appears to be the case with many of the protests in the Middle East and with earlier protests in Burma and Tibet, for example, where the masses were protesting economic issues (high prices of basic good, etc) and those protestors were later joined by groups with Western-oriented political views (i.e., the monks in Burma joined protests that were originally in response to fuel prices). Sometimes it happens the other way around—i.e., student protests, that are explicitly political, will become a conduit for the grievances of the masses. But it’s worth remembering that in any given mass movement most of the people involved are probably completely ignorant of the political issues. In that sense, I doubt the altruistic tendencies of those involved. Most of them just want to eat/work/etc.
This indeed may be a danger. But I think the upfront cost of the aftermath of a totalitarian society, the wrecking of a high trust society is actually more damning. The economic impact of this as well as its effect on human welfare can hardly be underestimated, even if the bulk of the damage is structural and memetic rather than genetic.
Be careful with this usage of the word evolution, people love to point out its incorrect, when it actually technically isn’t (though its still best to not employ it in the predarwinian sense).
Consider intelligence. Different people have different levels of intelligence. A lot of the difference is genetic. Research has progressed far enough that we can approximate the (standard deviation/mean) ratio.
What about altruism?
I was going to say that altruism is harder to measure than intelligence. But then I thought about it, and I don’t think that’s true. For some reason, our educational systems have never taken the idea of teaching altruism seriously enough to figure out how to measure it.
I don’t think anybody has ever tried to determine the heritability of altruism, but I don’t see why you couldn’t.