The Pathological Altruist

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by SoNotHer

[I]

What connection did you see to this line of thinking and the article's discussion of the new trajectory in academia to study "altruism" and its manifestations in human behavior and the laws of thermodynamics and cause/effect?

Please forgive the large snip of some really good stuff. I wanted to address this question specifically, though, because it is one of my little intellectual obsessions. Selfishness is easy to explain. Darwinian theory would predict that each organism is going full-out to look after its own interests. Altruism is an interesting puzzle and interesting puzzles are where science becomes something of an adventure. Why would altruism evolve?

Altruism evolved because while genes may be pseudo-selfish the world that the bodies these genes make is so complex that it actually pays to cooperate. Despite what we might expect from a very straight-forward reading of Darwinian theory, Nature continues to prove she is more clever than we are. How this gets booted up is through the fact of parents and offspring. Offspring have a cost but they also are an investment in the future. When a female is pregnant the nutrients that go into her offspring are not available for *her*. However, the payoff for her genes is that she passes them on into the future. Thus is altruism booted up. If parents *consistently* did what was solely in their own direct interest then their offspring would die off and the planet would be sterile. If, on the other hand, parents *never* pursued their own self-interest then they could be exploited not only by their own offspring but by their neighbors. Nature has to find an equilibrium between these two extremes and has to do it in a completely blind and haphazard fashion. This is why altruism is interesting.

The relationship between thermodynamics is that despite what we might wish about the world, there are always costs. Always. This means that when we look at the world and either try to explain why it works the way it does or try to envision how it might be improved upon, we must always ask ourselves the cost of things. Costs here do not mean money. Costs here is a synonym for consequences. The other day, my wife was talking about a situation when she was a child that is a perfect illustration. When she was a girl, she had an opportunity to skip two whole grades. This would have put her in the same grade as her elder brother. Her mother did not want to make her brother feel bad so she did not let her skip the grades. Either choice had potentially negative consequences; in one, her brother is, perhaps, humiliated by his little sister proving to be smarter than him. The other is her being held back. Her mother would've preferred solution where she got to skip two grades where both children got what they needed but that was not the situation she was presented with.

This is not about the wrongness of her decision in not letting her daughter jump two grades. Rather, it is to illustrate that there were no *possible* worlds, given the initial conditions, where her mother could have made a decision where there was not even the risk of cost. (In other words, it may have turned out to be the case that her brother might have been fine with his little sister skipping grades and this would actually provide the best possible outcome but the calculations her mother made was not knowing *how* things would work out so she was dealing with the potential cost-benefit.) Too often we ignore these types of considerations or try to dismiss them with hand-waving. But this is, in fact, where the nitty gritty work gets done *and* it is humbling because in trying to solve these kinds of problems one brushes right up against the limits of one's own abilities to grasp things.

I do not think we should look to the natural world for our morality, necessarily. Nature is horribly cruel and wasteful and has tortures that are the stuff of horror movies that various organisms use as a way of feeding themselves or propagating. But I think we *can* and *should* look to Nature for an understanding of ourselves and of the world we inhabit. Not so that we can learn what we should do, but so we can have some kind of ideas about what we can do. I would love for every adult in America to have a grounding in the kinds of trade-offs nature makes because all of the living things we see around us and we ourselves are the results of those trade-offs. That means I would love for every American adult to understand Darwinian theory because it gives people the tools to really start to be amazed at how Nature does things and why our world is so wonderful while, at the same time, training the mind to begin asking cost-questions. I would also love every American adult to understand the second law of thermodynamics because, again, it trains the mind to seek out and understand costs.

Cheers
Aj