Amerika

People like easy answers, especially in the form of symbols which through the magic of categorical logic, “seem” to apply everywhere all at once, like a complete and total fascist solution. If you are worried about crime, more enforcement seems like a magic bullet that stomps it down simultaneously across your city.

In the same vein, those who are concerned about morality or ideology make means-over-ends rules. “Go forth and sin no more!” involves a list of methods (“means”) that are sinful, just like political correctness prohibits acts like Noticing genetic-behavioral differences between sexes, classes, races, and ethnic groups.

PowerTip: the second one is always the underlying goal.

When thinking about goals is prohibited because your society is based on the prohibition of methods, you end up settling on what is left, which is simple socializing. Everybody wants to be somebody and to feel relevant, so empathy and altruism come out as “solutions” to a problem, not fulfillment of an affirmative goal.

Something like altruism exists through genetic group interests, and our modern “altruism” is a substitute for that:

Hamilton’s rule, introduced in the 1960s, says that altruism — helping others at your own expense — can evolve when the benefits to others, multiplied by how closely related they are to you, outweigh the cost to yourself. In simple terms, we’re more likely to make sacrifices for family because it helps our shared genes survive.

If our genes survive, we will sacrifice ourselves to help others because the same code that created us will live on through them. It is like a form of gene copying through proxy:

Hamilton’s rule, in ecology and sociobiology, mathematical formula devised by British naturalist and population geneticist W.D. Hamilton that supports the notion that natural selection favours genetic success, not reproductive success per se. It recognizes that individuals can pass copies of their genes on to future generations through direct parentage (the rearing of offspring and grand-offspring) as well as indirectly by assisting the reproduction of close relatives (such as nieces and nephews) through altruistic behaviour (behaviour that benefits other individuals at the expense of the one performing the action).

This article gives it more clarity: generally this involves devoting parenting resources to the offspring of siblings, which ensures that the parental line survives. Interestingly, this requires high relatedness or genetic similarity in an environment which easily supports additional children:

Comparative phylogenetic analyses show that cooperative breeding and eusociality are promoted by (i) high relatedness and monogamy and, potentially, by (ii) life-history factors facilitating family structure and high benefits of helping and (iii) ecological factors generating low costs of social behaviour.

Interestingly, our society has done all that it can to create an environment where children are expensive, therefore discouraging this behavior. After all, high relatedness creates culture which is an impediment to government and other controlling forces.

Ironically, altruism creates an opportunity for its opposite, the free riders who take advantage of the altruism of others without offering any of their own. Most definitions of “evil” involve this type of behavior, which in its extreme is opportunistic or pathological criminality.

As a population grows, it produces free riders who through a type of heckler’s veto enforce their behavior as the norm:

The major weakness of group selection as an explanation of altruism, according to the consensus that emerged in the 1960s, was a problem that Dawkins (1976) called ‘subversion from within’; see also Maynard Smith 1964. Even if altruism is advantageous at the group level, within any group altruists are liable to be exploited by selfish ‘free-riders’ who refrain from behaving altruistically. These free-riders will have an obvious fitness advantage: they benefit from the altruism of others, but do not incur any of the costs. So even if a group is composed exclusively of altruists, all behaving nicely towards each other, it only takes a single selfish mutant to bring an end to this happy idyll. By virtue of its relative fitness advantage within the group, the selfish mutant will out-reproduce the altruists, hence selfishness will eventually swamp altruism. Since the generation time of individual organisms is likely to be much shorter than that of groups, the probability that a selfish mutant will arise and spread is very high, according to this line of argument.

Owing to the mysteries of genetics, the change in genes that favors free riders may have a ripple effect among other genes:

The researchers also looked beyond the exact locations on the chromosome where the pesticide-resistance alleles reside. It’s known that oftentimes evolutionary changes in one place on a chromosome can cause something of a ripple effect, known as a selective sweep, because alleles at different loci on the same chromosome are physically linked.

“When we applied pesticides, we didn’t just change allele frequencies at the resistance locus—we affected loci all across the chromosome, which danced to the pesticide pulse, increasing and then decreasing in frequency,” said Karageorgi.

This means that when you see a society which is decayed, you are likely looking at genetic problems caused by the transition from altruism to free rider behavior.

Humans can avoid this fate by limiting altruism so that it does not become the single organizing principle of society. If altruism makes social acceptance likely, then it will be gamed, and as it is gamed, the free riders will take over and the society will decay like Rome.

Tags: altruism, free rider problem, genetics, subversion