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Matthew Gertner wrote:
>There's an interesting article in the Economist this week
>(http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1045223 -- like
>a good reactionary I read reactionary rags) that points out that purely
>selfish behavior based on this principle can lead to altruistic behavior on
>the macro level. Good news for everyone, I say.
>
Excellent article. Anyone interested in a sociobiological explanation
for altruism that goes beyond kin-selection to explain the specific
circumstances where group selection *does* lead to altruism could take a
look at "Unto Others" by Elliott Sobers and David Sloan Wilson,
particularly the first half. The criteria are surprisingly simple - you
need group selection, obviously, to reward the altruism, but you also
need regular reshuffling of the groups to reduce the opportunity for
selfish units to squeeze altruistic units out of the group. They
illustrated this by an example where farms were able to increase
egg-laying capacity by selecting groups of chickens which chared cages,
rather than just the individual best layers. Turned out that selecting
only individuals was selecting those that laid the greatest stress on
their colleagues - err... I mean cage-mates - so didn't scale up as
desired...
Francis.
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