Like sex, altruism is a great mystery in the life sciences, especially in the case of humans (because of is generous expression). Neither kin selection nor reciprocal altruism seem able to explain the scale of human societies, their cooperativeness, their often unselfish nature. Several years back David Sloan Wilson and Elliott Sober wrote Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior to offer their own model, which works within a multi-level selection paradigm which suggests that cooperation and altruism are favored at the level of groups, above and apart from their benefit to the individual.
In my argument with Steve Burton of Right Reason about the role of Christianity on the values and morals of our society these issues have lurked in the background. Steve has made repeated references to the New Testament, and the uniqueness of their ideas. I have repeated several times that though I think Steve has a case, it is very debatable because the extent of x in a text is not entirely quantifiable but captured by a gestalt understanding. A phylogeneticist once told the story of the problem with taxonomy before Willi Hennig's cladist revolution: basically, when two biologists had a disagreemant about a tree, their punchline would be, "because I said so!" There was really no way to dispute objectively these issues before taxonomy became systematic and evolved into Systematics. I have read the New Testament, as well as the Hebrew Bible (the latter multiple times). I am aware of the history of the Classical period in the West, and am reasonably familiar with the outline of history in China, the Middle East, etc. I am not convinced by "I said so," or repetitions of the same point again and again.*
So therefore I think we should look to evolution, psychology and other assorted social sciences. In that spirit, I present to you a series of posts by Dan Jones where he reviews altruism and cooperation from a game theoretic perspective. Here Dan comments on a paper which examines the reality that groups which do not punish freeriders seem to dissolve over the long run. Then, Dan puts the spotlight on a survey of altruism across cultures. Finally, in Beware of Others Dan illustrates why the human sciences are experimental sciences more than a priori reflection or post facto analysis, sometimes they are not anticipated by intuition (see case "BC"). I will quote one of Dan's points:
The first is to note that in all conditions, with mixes of ingroup and outgroup members, there was at least some sharing (altruism) and some punishment (altruistic punishment). In other words, players extended egalitarian norms, even if in a sometimes diluted form, to outgroup members. This is perhaps a problem for theories that see altruism arising through the selective extinction of groups that are less cooperative, and therefore less successful in the long run. Such a process sees differing groups as competing entities, and so they not be expected to include outgroups within sphere of social norms.
My overall contention has been that though the magnitude of altruism may very, it is simply false to imagine humans as pure rational actors, that our "state of nature" is one of all-against-all. The subjects were from two tribes in Papua New Guinea with a non-hostile relationship. The reality of altruism preceded the philosophical systemetization or religious justification of this behavior. Human was not invented, we evolved.
* Luke, any repetition of the same arguments you've been making for the past 2 years in a impolite manner will not be looked up positively by me, my patience is running thin with your incivility toward those who do not agree with you.
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It has always seemed to me that group selection is the selection of culturally-defined groups. If the group is very mixed genetically the genetic selection effect will be slight, but as long as the culture flourishes there will benefits to members of the group.
Don't know if this has been proposed, I can't imagine that it hasn't been, but it seems that a complex two-step selection process would be viable genetically: some sort of hereditary behavior factor of the altruistic type, which makes a cultural system possible, and which in combination with the advantages of the cultural system (but only then) enhances reproductive success.
"Altruism" strikes me as a poor label, because it describes so many kinds of actual behavior. The actual thing selected for would probably be more specific, like "bonding with leaders" or "suggestibility" or as far as that goes, "rabid kamimaze hatred of all outgroups".
It has always seemed to me that group selection is the selection of culturally-defined groups. If the group is very mixed genetically the genetic selection effect will be slight, but as long as the culture flourishes there will benefits to members of the group.
see richerson & boyd's work for cultural group selection.
you are correct that the semantic issues are knarly.
Peter Cornings's 'Holistic Darwinism' and earlier papers on synergy and hierarchical group selection are relevant as well.
Cooperation is only a mystery if you take the ideological position that explanations of behavior must be reduced to individual 'rational decision-making'. This is the premise of most Eurocentric social science, especially economics and political science. If organisms/people are first and formost 'rational' maximizers of immediate self-interest then the fact the they cooperate (they do!) is a 'mystery'.
If you start from the idea that people are first and formost socialized beings, that even selfish behavior is learned behavior, then cooperation (benefiting self and others)and the sanctioning of free-riders, appear as perfectly 'natural' and adaptive behaviors!
Well, some things, unlike taxonomy, may not be particularly susceptible to being systematized, at least presently.
I'd imagine that altrusim is the sort of thing that folks would immediately refer to the realm of sexual selection. In mammals where childhood is long and taxing on parents, we might imagine a higher degree of capacity for empathy/sympathy (which we can further imagine is present to some degree of necessity in social animals) was a good indicator of the degree of connecteness a father might feel toward a particular set of offspring and the level of contribution he might make to upbringing.
This trait being selected for and cultivated over a number of generations without significant counterselection leads to a situation where behavior we'd recognize as altruistic may have been developed and further cultivated at the level of organized society and culture.
But all of this is just so much storytelling. The point I'd make is that it is only necessary that we evolved in such a way that this story is possible, not to argue that our evolution determined the present outcome unequivocally. I doubt you'll get the latter any time soon.
BTW: What are your views on reciprocal altruism? I haven't read loads about it, but I've always been suspicious that it's not the sort of thing that could actually evolve in the way I've usually read it described. (Usually that altrusitiuc behavior evolved because there were a number of governing traits--punishing cheaters and paying off debts--that encouraged it. But where did those things come from? I don't find their presence any easier to just accept than the presence of altruism)
From a psychological standpoint, my hunch is that altrusim might be linked (as I suspect religion is) to the poignancy of our sense of loss when things change suddenly and irrevokably. We seem to do a lot of things to preserve the status quo, to not be reminded of our own mortality and that of those closest to us, and to heavily structure and anthropomorphy experiences where we have to face up to mortality and our powerlessness before it.