>>> rsp at uniserve.com 11/01/00 02:25PM >>>
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> Well, but why should an egoist care about "group" selection?
>
Nobody "cares" about group selection because it is a biological and not a psychological category. Types of worms and bees are evolutionary altruists but they don't care because evolutionary forces are non-propositional and are thus outside belief-desire psychology. Because of group selection egoists have died out. Ernst Mayr puts it this way:
"George Williams and Richard Dawkins have made a mistake, in my opinion, in completely rejecting group selection. But we have to be careful how we define what we mean by a group. There are different kinds of groups.There is one type of group that is a target for selection and that is the social group. Darwin knew this and identified it clearly in 1871 in the Descent of Man. Hominid groups of hunter-gatherers were costantly competing with other hominid groups ; some were superior and succeeded and others were not. It becomes quite clear that those groups who had highly co-operative and altruistic individuals were more successful than the ones torn apart by internal strife and egoism....**The essential point is that if you are altruistic and make your group more successful you therby also increase the fitness of the altrustic individual (yourself)!**...There is no question that the groups that were the most successful had these individuals that were co-operative and altruistic, and those traits are genetic. But the group itself was the unit that was selected." Interview in The Skeptic Jan 2000.
Shouldn't the highlighted sentence above give the egoist reason to be altruistic?
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CB: I think they might be defining egoist as someone who absolutely only cares about themself and does not care whether his or her offspring survive. In other words, "fitness" is not the better life of the egoist, but the better chance of the egoist's offspring surviving unto many generations...
If we take "social being" to mean "altruistic being" then the above is a hypothesis on a unique characteristic of the origin of the human species - most group oriented hominid. Not homo sapiens , but homo socio.