[extropy-chat] The unselfish gene

Giu1i0 Pri5c0 gpmap at runbox.com
Fri Dec 19 04:56:11 UTC 2003


>From the Guardian Unlimited: The origin of altruism goes to the heart of the
gene/culture debate that was launched in 1975 with the publication of EO
Wilson's Sociobiology and, a year later, Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene.
Sociobiology claims that human nature - and by extension human society - is
rooted in our genes: we are, according to Dawkins, "lumbering robots"
created "body and mind" by selfish genes.
At the same time kindness and cooperation underpin much of human society.
>From the Kyoto agreement to arms controls or the state of public toilets,
they all depend on individual willingness to commit resources to a common
good. But no one has come up with a satisfactory evolutionary explanation of
why we do it. In a recent Nature paper, Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher of
the University of Zurich claim that the key to promote what they call strong
reciprocity is rewarding generosity with kindness but punishing cheaters,
even at the expense of the punisher. Strong reciprocity promotes kindness
and discourages cheats, but is it a product of our genes or in our culture?
It can't be entirely genetic, since different human societies (with very
similar genes) vary greatly in their tolerance of cheating. Fehr and
Fischbacher argue for gene-culture co-evolution: cultural and institutional
environments promote social norms that favour the selection of genes that
promote cooperati! on.
Making strong reciprocity work at both a local level (discouraging
anti-social behaviour) and international level (persuading the Americans to
sign the Kyoto agreement) would be beneficial to society and the world.

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