The term ‘altruism’ in group selection
The way I see it, altruism has been the big selling point for group selection. The only way altruism would have been able to evolve is through group selection, so the presence of altruism is strong evidence for the existence of group selection.
Group selectionists have been (rightly) criticized by pointing out that they were merely looking for an explanation that would fit the results they had already decided on and wrote the conclusion before looking for hypotheses. They wanted a nice, friendly, altruistic world and devised a theory of why this should be so.
Now, while I fully agree their methods were wrong, I want to take a closer look at the word “altruism” in this context.
Is a cow a vegetarian?
Think about this question, if you will, before reading on.
I would say no, it’s not. True, a cow only eats plants but there is a crucial difference that separates it from a real vegetarian. When a cow is hungry its brain tells it to eat grass, it doesn’t give the option to choose meat. A cow’s digestive system is specialized in processing grass, eating meat would send it haywire.
A vegetarian, on the other hand, is a human, an omnivore, he can just as easily process food from animal as plant sources. Not eating meat is a deliberate and conscious choice.
The point I’m getting at is that eating plants because that’s all you can do doesn’t make you a real vegetarian. Luckily we have a convenient term to make this distinction: herbivore.
Now lets go back to altruism.
Bees have been called altruistic; after all, what greater sacrifice can an organism bring then its ability to reproduce? What if we, to stop overpopulation, sterilize every newborn child for the next three years.
Every time we meet one of those children we would give them a pat on the back and congratulate them for the enormous amounts of altruism they have displayed. I doubt many of them would agree.
It’s not really altruism if you have no choice, is it? The difference between true altruism and cases like this is deliberate choice and doing more then “default helping”.
In short: whenever the group selectionists saw a herbivore, they called it a vegetarian. Just like we make a distinction between herbivores and vegetarians, I would like to see someone introducing a new term for that-thing-animals-do-that-looks-like-altruism.
p.s. This is my very first article on this site, any feedback and tips would be greatly appreciated.
“Choice” is not so precisely defined concept. When a cow is hungry, its brain tells it to eat grass. When a vegetarian is hungry, his brain tells him to eat vegetables. Of course, the vegetarian can speak about the choice, but the boundary is not so strict and crucial as you seem to imply. There seems to be a big difference, because we are human, and we understand how humans think, while the cow’s decision making process is opaque.
Try to make your point tabooing the word choice (don’t use synonyms like free will, possibility and so on). I predict it would be far harder to do, and if done, it would be more interesting.
An unrelated question: You clearly understand in what sense altruism is used in the context which you are writing about. Still, you propose a new term. Why? Do you think that there is a real danger of misunderstanding, using current terminology?
Why? You spent quite a bit of time discussing exactly what you mean to have this distinction distinguish. But you never provided a reason why having such a new term would be a good thing.
Also, the first few paragraphs talked about the arguments for and against group selection. But what does that have to do with the new term you would like to see? The debate over group selection is confused on many points, but one thing that is not confused in this debate is the definition of “altruism”. Both sides are perfectly happy calling cellular slime molds ‘altruistic’ - though they may disagree as to why they are altruistic.
I’m not sure why you think reductionism eliminates essences, rather than finding more fundamental ones and pointing them out with greater precision. What definition of “essence” are you using in this post?
EDIT: XiXiDu already asked essentially the same question.
EDIT 2: How did this comment get onto the wrong article? It belongs here.
In a sense, it does find more fundamental ones, but I don’t think this is a good way of thinking about it. I’ve suggested elsewhere that what typically gets labeled “non-reductionism” is really basically a form of “greedy reductionism”—essences add, in some sort of pretty much linear fashion. But real things aren’t typically just collections of fundamental things, with their properties summed up; they’re patterns in the interactions of these things (not just collections of particles!), and understanding their properties requires understanding these interactions.
Have you read The Selfish Gene? You should read it. It’s good. It talks about this.
The short version is something like Honore’s post. The quantified version is called kin selection, where you help other peoples’ genes succeed because those genes are likely to also be your genes.
If we’re discussing group selection, we must be talking about genetic altruism: genes coding for traits that increase the group’s fitness at the expense of the individual’s. Such a trait could be a behavioral trait, including the psychological altruism exhibited by an intelligent being.
Can you point to a mistake that is made as a result of conflating the two concepts? If not, I don’t see a problem with the terminology.
is there a real case of (non-human) altruism among non-kin in the animal kingdom? I don’t think there is...
Altruism in the conventional sense? Yes, there are plenty of cases. Vampire bats will let non-kin bats suck their blood if they would otherwise starve. Apes will hunt and battle, risking their lives for the good of the tribe. Pets will risk their lives to help their owners. In addition to ″The Selfish Gene″, I’d recommend Bob Wright’s books in the same area.
Well, there are lots of cases of one animal helping another of a totally different species (e.g. dolphins helping drowning swimmers). But you could argue that those are just kin-selected heuristics applied broadly.
But in that case, is there a real case of human altruism in the animal kingdom?
How is that different from arguing that human altruism is just heuristics for assisting kin-and-ingroup applied broadly?
It’s a description, not an explanation. Both are valid altruism.
Right. Although you should note that that’s exactly what I said in my last sentence (except the reader had to think it themselves):
Also note that the poster I was replying to was particularly interested in altruism not explainable by kin selection.
That seemed really pointlessly condescending.
(Edit: This referred to a previous version of the parent comment.)
I’ll edit it to be nicer. I guess I don’t like it when people miss the subtext of my posts and then tread over the exact same ground, not noticing my footprints.
Understandable, and I know that feels like losing status hit points which you then need to recoup, but at least within LW, it’s best to assume good faith on the part of other commenters, including assuming that object-level criticisms aren’t disguised status attacks to be returned in kind. (And even if some object-level criticism seems to imply some status loss on your part by implying that you’ve made some very obvious mistake, a counterargument or explanation should suffice as a response to that.)
Welcome to LW!
I think the distinction you are trying to make should involve the concept of weighing benefits for others against benefits for the decision making agent (not necessarily consciously, it could just be that your mind/body was shaped by a force which penalizes for harms to others).
As a side note, I don’t know about others, but I find the excess whitespace in this article a little annoying.
Agreed.