>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.
A few problems:
1. Humans are not worms & bees. If we were, we wouldn't be living in the world of "Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham" as we are now.
2. Why seek a moral lesson in nature, be it an "egoistic" or "altruistic" one? There is no shame in becoming extinct, as Stephen Jay Gould says.
3. Since humans are creatures of social relations, there is no pure "egoist." What looks like a problem of "egoism" to us may be something else altogether whose essence & cause the term "egoism" doesn't capture.
Yoshie