Sorry, just saw your Oct comment. From an evolutionary perspective there is a distinct advantage to supporting kin who share some genes with you. This is kin selection, espoused to an extreme by Richard Dawkins. It is less clear what advantage there is to supporting unrelated individuals, other than the concept of reciprocal altruism - m…
Sorry, just saw your Oct comment. From an evolutionary perspective there is a distinct advantage to supporting kin who share some genes with you. This is kin selection, espoused to an extreme by Richard Dawkins. It is less clear what advantage there is to supporting unrelated individuals, other than the concept of reciprocal altruism - members of a stable social group can gain by performing altruistic actions for non-kin if they can expect the recipient to be altruistic in return at some future time. The system is only stable, however, if recipients do in fact reciprocate. If they behave selfishly and don't reciprocate, then the system becomes unstable and breaks down. Maybe laws developed as a means of punishing selfish individuals? It seems that "cheating" the group to benefit kin would always have been a problem for larger social groups and the need for regulatory constraints on selfishness would increase as group size increases. I could go on, but I won't! I will repeat my caveat that I approach this as a biologist who has studied animal behavior and evolution. Those with expertise on human behavior may enjoy disputing everything I've said and I would be glad to learn from them.
Sorry, just saw your Oct comment. From an evolutionary perspective there is a distinct advantage to supporting kin who share some genes with you. This is kin selection, espoused to an extreme by Richard Dawkins. It is less clear what advantage there is to supporting unrelated individuals, other than the concept of reciprocal altruism - members of a stable social group can gain by performing altruistic actions for non-kin if they can expect the recipient to be altruistic in return at some future time. The system is only stable, however, if recipients do in fact reciprocate. If they behave selfishly and don't reciprocate, then the system becomes unstable and breaks down. Maybe laws developed as a means of punishing selfish individuals? It seems that "cheating" the group to benefit kin would always have been a problem for larger social groups and the need for regulatory constraints on selfishness would increase as group size increases. I could go on, but I won't! I will repeat my caveat that I approach this as a biologist who has studied animal behavior and evolution. Those with expertise on human behavior may enjoy disputing everything I've said and I would be glad to learn from them.