Genetic's poisoned chalice

[boxy]

Comprehending the selfless gene.

http://www.kuleuven.ac.be/bio/ento/PDFs ... tz2000.pdf

In his last years, even Price himself lost interest in securing recognition for his scientific achievement. Altruism, which had begun as an intellectual problem, became an all-consuming personal concern. In the midst of an extraordinary burst of scientific creativity in the summer of 1970, Price abruptly converted from militant atheist to fundamentalist Christian. After his conversion, he combined his work in genetics with a passionate interest in biblical exegesis. Later, he decided that the mission of a true Christian was to help his fellow man, and he spent increasing amounts of time aiding homeless alcoholics and the elderly in his adopted city of London. As he ministered to others, his own life disintegrated into chaos. He died in 1975.

[Rainbow Moonlight]

Interesting article Boxy. Thanks for the link.

[JWFrogen]

I has gots the sex gene.

[JWFrogen]

But to the point at DNA, if it really was a selfless gene would it not let it's rival the selfish gene take over?

[JWFrogen]

When I am sad I have......wait for it.........blue genes.

[boxy]

But to the point at DNA, if it really was a selfless gene would it not let it's rival the selfish gene take over?

They're both the same concept. Selflessness done for reproductive benefit is the gene being selfish (looking out for it's own interests, as it were).

In his own work, Hamilton had assumed a population that was infinitely large. But Price saw that calculations of relatedness turn out differently in a small population of closely related individuals. In a finite population, individual A can be negatively related to individual B, in the sense of sharing fewer genes with B than with the members of the group on average. Negative relatedness changed the predictions of Hamilton's theory in subtle but significant ways. First, it made clear that if you have a gene that benefits your group, that gene will survive only if it is of more benefit to your close relatives than to your distant ones. More disturbingly, it implied that it could be adaptive for animals to harm themselves in order to harm others more. Price called this "spiteful behavior": It might pay for an animal to take the life of a "negatively related" neighbor even at some cost to itself.
Racism and militarism is our genes looking to gain a genetic advantage over seemingly unrelated, "others". The truth is sometimes ugly, and seldom "fair".

[JWFrogen]

Selflessness done for reproductive benefit is the gene being selfish (looking out for it's own interests, as it were).

Now pacifism posing as selflessness makes sense, it is really genetically selfish, a simple attempt to stay alive while others protect with no real atruism at all.

It is all in the cowardly genes.

[boxy]

Now you're getting it, Frogs.

All this talk about describing motivations of the gene are simply attention grabbing exercises.

There is no motivation behind it, only the numbers, the probabilities sorted over millennia, selecting the types that will ensure their type persist.

[JWFrogen]

Now you're getting it, Frogs.

All this talk about describing motivations of the gene are simply attention grabbing exercises.

There is no motivation behind it, only the numbers, the probabilities sorted over millennia, selecting the types that will ensure their type persist.

Well I am dam glad natural selection selected my glorious penis.

[boxy]

Something only looked seriously at by people with some rather dodgy motivations, but anyway... the science behind our natural resistance to immigration, where obviously "negatively related" groups enter a population.


Another factor certain to confound simple solutions is the mass immigration that has occurred over the last few decades, which has increased the number and the zero-sum character of conflicting ethnic interests. But there is hope in humankind’s ingenuity. For example, Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1989) has discussed ethnic federalism constrained by reproductive interests, while recognizing that no all-purpose solution exists.

"In multi-ethnic states, federalistic structures allow different ethnic groups self-government within certain bounds and in cooperation with the other groups sharing a superordinate interest on the basis of reciprocity. This can work as long as such a social contract implies that differential reproduction at the cost of the other is avoided." (p. 622)

"Since the state is historically a very recent development, it is no wonder that man is still in the experimental stage regarding governmental forms. No one could provide a ready-made governmental recipe, but there are a number of guidelines available. Unless we remain receptive to new ideas and adaptations, we will face serious problems." (p. 624)

Nation states have the advantage of allowing relatively individualistic behavior to be adaptive by muting ethnic genetic interests as a factor in intra-state politics and economics. Perhaps this is why the industrial revolution was the product of nation states in the European tradition. In principle the ethnic state is conducive to liberalism in its political and economic forms. When competition is limited to individuals and families and does not involve ethnies, individuals can behave in ways that approximate the optimal (individual) utility maximization modeled by econometricians. But in multi-ethnic states individual economic rationality is maladaptive when it leads to loss of relative ethnic fitness and ethnic stratification, as is common in multicultural societies.

From an evolutionary perspective a theoretical problem remains with ethnic states. A homogeneous nation state precludes ethnic free-riding on collective goods, but is no guarantee against free-riding by co-ethnics. Intraethnic elite free-riding should be less maladaptive than inter-ethnic freeriding, if only because co-ethnics benefit in the former case; but it still endangers the inclusive fitness of the majority of the ethny as well as the inclusive fitness of non-free-riders relative to co-ethnics. Thus altruism directed towards the ethny is evolutionarily unstable when free-riding is not controlled. The two main types of non-ethnic free-riding parallel the types of ethnic free-riding: welfare-dependent classes and elites. A democratic state will lose legitimacy if it fails to provide welfare by transferring resources from rich to poor. However, a modern economy will lose its competitive edge if it does not reward large economic contributions with substantial advantages in prestige and resources. A related phenomenon is the managerial class, critical for running the state and corporate bureaucracies. This elite group has privileged access to the levers of cultural and political power and tends to develop self-serving ideologies and institutions that put its interests ahead of the national interest (Burnham, 1975/1964; Francis, 1999/1984). Class and ethnic interests potentially conflict because they threaten defection by winners as well as losers in the competition for resources.

Class competition is complicated by reproductive interests at the family level, in contrast to ethnic competition which involves group-level interests. The problem is to strike a biosocial contract between the classes that does not compromise individual reproductive opportunities while defending jointly held ethnic kinship. If a solution exists to this problem it will probably involve treating ethnic genetic interest as a collective good (Goetze, 1998), one that is managed by the state as an evolutionary group strategy (Boyd & Richerson, 1985; MacDonald, 2002/1994). Collective goods are already managed by states, such as group defense, education, and communication infrastructure. Contemporary states also exercise some control of free-riding on these collective goods through such means as law-based policing of public behavior, universal taxation, and compulsory national service. One challenge would be to maintain the transparency of both the strategy and its management by the state as a means of protecting against elite free-riding of the form that manipulates state power. An equally important challenge would be to prevent the double-edged sword of ethnic nepotism from cutting both ways. This will involve such strategies as balance-of-power diplomacy and participation in international institutions that blunt aggressive military nationalism in the international arena. The trick is to advance this agenda while leaving room for other institutions that husband national solidarity and its multiple benefits (Salter 2002; in press-b). This would seem the appropriate domain for constitutional idealism in which abstracted values become a basis for legitimating social arrangements. A principled resolution of class and national conflict could become the basis for a truly universal nationalism.
http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/egi