People try to do right by each other, no matter the motivation, study finds

Re:People try to do right by each other, no matter the motiv... by colechristensen on Friday June 05, 2020 @02:41PM (#23432205)

The premise of The Selfish Gene (Dawkins) is that the unit of evolution isn't the individual but the gene. Individuals need not be selfish, their genes are, and genes compete with each other.

It's then easy to justify altruistic behavior when the best interests of an individual isn't up for considerations but the best interests of a gene. Selfishness isn't competing against yourself.

Use this drive to work with the evolutionary dynamics of populations in a "cheating" vs. "cooperating" and you get an arms race of cheaters vs cooperators which tends around some equilibrium which, going back to selfish genes, tends to balance the costs and rewards of selfishness which in lots of different creatures tends towards cooperation between individuals quite a lot.

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Re:People try to do right by each other, no matter the motiv... by mattmanser on Friday June 05, 2020 @06:12PM (#23434628)

It's pretty frightening that he's an "an associate professor of sociology" and he doesn't even know basic under-grad evolutionary theory, yet thinks it's ok for him to talk about it.

Basically spent his life and a bunch of money rediscovering the wheel when biologists could have told him this was the expected result.

Worse still, he talks about ants, which share 75% of their genes so actually do have a clear evolutionary reason to co-operate.

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