Lisa & Ian Murray wrote:
>
> The larger question is whether the selection "mechanisms" would be stable
> enough to prevent the re-emergence of egoists, given the improbability of NS
> wiping them out. One can't refute egoism any more than one can refute
> capitalism.
Excellent questions,Ian. The point was just that NS operates between groups as well as within groups and that groups of altruists do better than groups of egoists. There is no question that within groups, egoists have an advantage since they can share the public goods without incurring the personal costs of producing said goods. David Sloan Wilson calls this "the central problem of social life" Here's Wilson:
"The reason that higher-level adaptations cannot easily evolve is that natural selection is based on relative fitness. Imagine a population of solid citizens and shirkers. The solid citizens produce a public good thatis available to all, including themselves. For purposes of the example,let's say the public good can be produced at no cost to the solid citizens. Not only do they share the bounty, but they lose nothing by creating it. Even so, the solid citizens will not be favored by natural selection in this example because the solid citizens and the shirkers do not differ in their survival or reproduction. Natural selection requires differences in fitness so raising or lowering the fitness of everybody in the population has no effect. If, as seems likely, the public good is costly to produce, the solid citizens will go extinct, even if they share the benefits, because their private cost reduces their fitness relative to the shirkers. Behaviors that are "for the good of the group" are at best neutral (if the public good is cost-free) and at worst maladaptive(if there is any cost associated with producing the public good). I have called this the "fundamental problem of social life". D.S. Wilson "Group Selection, Nonzerosumness and the Human Gaia Hypothesis."
>
> Darwin's quote is the perfect apologia for imperialism and racism.
I don't follow. Its usually the hard core individual selectionists like Dawkins Wilson et.al that are accused or rationalising imperialims, racism and xenophobia.
Isn't the
> quest for advantage itself antithetical to altruism? Also to the extent that
> altruists are "locked in" to a struggle against egoists, isn't that, too,
> just a different form of social Darwinism?
Perhaps, but as an altruist, would you rather live amongst altruists or egoists?
The overall point is the banal one that the less free riders there are, the better socialism will be and the longer it will last and thrive.
Sam Pawlett
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