Slime mold does not use words.
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Indeed! I think the concept of selfhood might be one of those notions that Adam and Eve picked up in their communication with God.
Slime mold missed out on that. ; - )
But even without this human concept of self, all living organisms, nevertheless, maintain a separateness from their environment as well as an identity in the sense of knowing (i.e. having information and making distinctions) what internal states are acceptable and correct.
It may not quite live up to the human concept of self but there are many points of similarity.
Words have meaning and slime mold does not possess self-awareness. It has ‘attached’ sensors that help it steer. Just like a Javelin SAM. You may be working from your unshared and self-written dictionary…
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Yes words have meaning. But those meanings are in people’s heads and quite subjective. The words are not out there stuck to things or bounding things except that we impose them on reality with our minds, fabricating imaginary lines with our made up categories. With science, particularly with the use of mathematical measures we go beyond the limitations of our minds to language in order to see the universe more on its own terms, where there is a great deal more continuity than our words imply. All we have to do is visit another culture and see how they categorize things in completely different way in order to see how arbitrary our categories can be.
I suspect that the confusion of words with reality plays some part in the creationist rejection of evolution with their talk of “kinds” which are after all only the names and categories we have plastered onto the natural world. Even in the Biblical account, the natural world had not such names and categories in it already, but these were things Adam and Eve added to the world.
It is not that the words and language are unimportant – but often you cannot really see the importance of things until you fully understand what they are and how they change things so completely.
I am reminded of the that dialogue Susan has with Death in Terry Pratchett’s “The Hogsfather.”
Susan: Now tell me…
Death : What would have happened if you hadn’t saved him?
Susan : Yes.
Death : The sun would not have risen.
Susan : Then what would have happened?
Death : A mere ball of flaming gas would have illuminated the world.
Susan : All right, I’m not stupid. You’re saying that humans need fantasies to make life bearable.
Death : No. Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
Susan : With tooth fairies? Hogfathers?
Death : Yes. As practice, you have to start out learning to believe the little lies.
Susan : So we can believe the big ones?
Death : Yes. Justice, mercy, duty. That sort of thing.
Susan : They’re not the same at all!
Death : You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and THEN show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet… you try to act as if there is some ideal order in the world. As if there is some… some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.
Susan : But people have got to believe that, or what’s the point?
Death : You need to believe in things that aren’t true. How else can they become?
Now I am not agreeing with Death in this conversation entirely. And yet there is a lot of truth to what he is saying. I don’t think justice, mercy, duty (or love) are just lies. They are ideals which we aim for. In a sense you can say they are a bit like the boundaries by which living things separate themselves from their environment, even though it is the same molecules bouncing against each other. Yet there is an order we impose on the portion that is part of us. Likewise our mind imposes an order on the world in order to understand it. It is not entirely real but nor is it all just fantasy. By the means of science we can measure some of that order out there, and show that it works in predicting what we measure.
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If you’re content to rely on second-hand interpretations as opposed to looking critically at the actual scientific data, there’s nothing I can do to stop you… I’ve had some geologists tell me the earth is 6000 years old too…
Seems to me that an important distinction regarding chimp adoptions is that, regardless of what life advantages this might entail, we can be pretty sure they do not base their action to care for an orphan on any costs vs rewards analysis. Being wordless means that they have no re-presented world in their mind where they can weigh opposing hypothetical courses of action. If that’s right they can only be acting out of pure sympathy and feeling. Now a Kantian might say that is no basis for describing the action as moral since it isn’t done out of a sense of duty. But after reading The Righteous Mind, I seriously doubt that the call to duty plays the decisive role we think it does in what Kant would call moral acts in humans either.
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I don’t know about adoptions, but in other sorts of animal behaviour (for example optimal foraging), animals do seem to assess costs and benefits when “deciding” between behavioural options, its just that we have no evidence that they are “consciously” weighing the options when doing so. For example, a predator hawk might operate according to an inherited behavioural rule of thumb: “If I perch in a tree for “x” amount of time and detect no prey below me, I will move on to a new perch in a different field in the hope it will be more energetically profitable”. Now–no ornithologist actually believes the hawk is doing math in its head or consciously rationalizing its decision options. It’s simply that hawks in nature that shifted locations after experiencing a long dry spell did better than hawks that stayed in a sucky spot—and so natural selection has favoured the inheritance of any “unconscious rule” that motivates a hawk to shift to a new location.
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The word is “hearsay.” It you think listening to a primatologist sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History (which is an important research institution) and the Leakey Foundation is no better than listening to a geologist saying the earth is 6k years old, then …
If you are so sure the primatologist is correct, then why are you reluctant to consider the actual data of the study? Look, I’m not here to argue with people who have their minds firmly made up and don’t want to discuss the evidence (or lack thereof).
For those actually interested in the looking at the Chimp study on unrelated adoptions, I’ll attach the link to this paper that I found. Note that despite the word “Altruism” in the title, the authors have not studied whether or not the adopting Chimps got individual social or survival benefits from adopting. In my experience, this is typical of papers coming out of the anthropological/primate literature which use the term “Altruism” very loosely to describe any “nice” behaviour done to another, without assessing whether there is a net cost to the donor. In fact, the authors in the body of the paper are candid and say that it is possible that 1) Adopting males may have gained coalition partners and adopting females may have gained in social status (but the authors didn’t track this) and 2) Because this particular troop lived in an area with high leopard predation, all individuals may have gotten survival benefits by keeping the defensive ability of the troop high (i.e. by keeping group size large). So it is highly probable that there is an element of individual selfishness that underlies these adoptions–at least the data in this study are insufficient to establish that these adoptions are truly altruistic. Altruism in Forest Chimpanzees: The Case of Adoption
And some died trying to hide them. It seems you are trying to raise animals and demean humans with those examples that show only one part of truth.
It’s nice to know that there is someone who really knows his stuff here(at least you appear to), it gives comfort that when I create some scientifically stupid theory it would be quickly disproven.
So, you said that you didn’t observe any truly altruistic behaviours in humans, didn’t you? It’s probably very hard to pinpoint a behaviour that truly doesn’t give any benefit to a person, but if altruistic includes also behaviour that would kill one to save another and that would also count as truly altruistic that makes things simpler.
I assume things like parents sacrificing their lives for their kids doesn’t count as their genes still would be passed if their kids survived.
Let’s return then to Poland during WW2 example, some families or people were hiding Jews and died for this, some woman even saved 2500 children Jews. Action that made her a lot more likely to die. Another guy went into the death camp voluntarily to record atrocities that happened there, it’s not hard to say that something like that is very risky and could’ve easily result in his death if he was chosen for execution or just died from starvation.
How one explains those examples ruling out altruism? Maybe those families were pressured? Maybe they saw chance for cooperation that would pay off if they managed to hold them through? What with that woman? Maybe some maternal instincts told her to protect the children even if they are not hers? What’s with the guy that went to Holocaust? Maybe he was sure that we would survive even when it wasn’t so certain? Maybe he was forced to do it? Maybe war had such effect on all those people that normal survival instincts were not working properly?
It’s very hard to see people choose truly altruistic thing, even if they cooperate they will probably do it with their benefit in mind, at least most of the time, but isn’t it reasonable to think that among 7 billion people some, for whatever reason, do something that decreases their fitness for another human?
I agree that action of animals shouldn’t be considered to be good or bad morally and I was also against seeing animals as empathetic but you shocked me with a fact that animal cannot do something good for the sake of the group if it reduces their fitness, I always thought that it paradoxically increases their fitness because in the future animals with the same behaviour will be more likely to mate as it will be more profitable to have around mates with traits that ensure survival of the group and it will be somehow recognised by evolution, so in nutshell, individual loses but gene survives. But if you say there is no such thing I will take your word for it.
And what with a dogs that after their owner died they starved to death from sorrow, at least if I remember those accounts correctly, does it not count because animal became distraught or at least very confused and lost? If to find one’s actions altruistic scientists would need to get rid of situations that heavily affect human psychology or at least observe than in most cases human did the altruistic thing then it’s unlikely that there is such a thing. As most people will not sacrifice their lives for another and in the less risky situation it’s nearly always beneficial in some way to help another person there can’t be an unambiguos opinion that the action was truly altruistic.
Feel free to correct me if I said something inaccurate
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I was disappointed to learn that Ukrainian Romas were being discriminated against at a food relief station. Disappointed, not surprised.
A Roma refugee from Ukraine receives a beverage from a volunteer at the humanitarian aid center at Nyugati train station in central Budapest. While the Roma family had to show their passports to police officers, on the right, before being allowed to receive food, other Ukrainians were not required to show any documentation. Each Roma child only received one beverage and one sandwich while the other refugees were offered as much as they want.
NYT photo caption
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Thanks for your very detailed and insightful comments! Actually, I think you are correct about humans --there probably are cases of true altruism here, although they may be relatively rare and go against what comes naturally for us (against the “self-centered” behaviours inherited by natural selection). Like the examples of people in WWII putting themselves in danger to hide Jews from the Nazis, or risking their own lives to document horrors in detention camps. Jesus modelled true altruism by giving his life for his enemies and encourages his followers to cultivate the same attitude, although it is very difficult! We have evidence that humans, unlike animals, can consciously assess the morality of behavioural options and choose to override what natural selection/evolution would incline them to do (humans can choose to behave altruistically even if it reduces their biological fitness).
The reason that evolution cannot select for a behaviour in which an individual sacrifices ONLY for the group and gets no individual pay-back is that such an altruistic gene would leave fewer offspring than others in the group who lacked the self-sacrifice. In other words, genes for “true altruism” in a group of individuals will always be out-competed by a gene for “take advantage of altruists in the group” genes. So, evolutionarily, groups of pure altruists can’t persist because they are always subject to invasion by genes/individuals with enlightened self-interest. But here it gets tricky and becomes crucial on how one does the accounting for the costs and benefits coming to the group, vs. those coming to the individual. Because an individual CAN make a costly donation that helps the survival of the group, as long as the group’s survival also feeds back and helps the donor’s own individual reproductive success (and thereby allows that gene for generosity to spread and persist in the group). So, as long as there is a NET reproductive advantage coming to an individual by cooperating and being generous to others in the group, one would expect “nice” social behaviours to evolve. The only detail to note is that such pro-group behaviours are accurately called “cooperative” or “reciprocal” interactions because some benefit flows back to the individual-- they are not “truely altruistic” where there is a net sacrificial reproductive cost to the individual.
It’s possible that some of the higher animals with a degree of self-consciousness (although not well understood because we can’t get into animal’s minds) feel a type of emotion like rage or sympathy, or despondency/sense-of-lack when a mate dies. Hormones may race in their bodies, their brains and neurons may react to produce such a feeling…and they may react with a behaviour in line with those hormones/feelings. What is in question is whether animals have the cognitive ability to “imagine” alternative behaviours and cognitively assess and judge what their emotions are directing them to do versus what they “ought to do” from a moral standpoint, ie. whether they can override their emotions (which come as a result of natural selection), with free-will to decide between alternate behaviours.
Re: dogs and their dead owners. It wouldn’t surprise me if dogs showed despondent behaviour when their prime pack-member disappeared. However, one would not expect in the wild, that this would cause social animals to starve themselves to death or effectively “commit suicide”. So if domestic dogs regularly do such a thing, it is indeed a bit puzzling.
Hope this long answer helps… thanks for the great comments and if you have any more questions or examples to mention, I’d welcome them. Group social dynamics and evolution is a complicated thing to get one’s head around, for sure.
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Let me just add that, yes, some people question whether any true altruism exists in humans because, just as you discuss, one can probably always think of some contrived way it could benefit them personally. I personally do think true altruism in humans is rather rare, but is theoretically possible because of our free will and ability for rational, self-conscious decision making that can override our tribalistic and self-centered impulses. In many cases, however, humans will be primed by evolution to favour and cooperate only with those from their own group, not with members of competing groups or “tribal enemies”, so their empathy and cooperative behaviours will extend only to their own relatives or social group members (from which they will gain net benefits).
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or did Jesus model true…
Have you considered Hebrews 12:2…
But at what a cost. That joy is us, if we belong to him(!).
There are rewards in heaven – I like C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce about Sarah Smith:
Very interesting musings. From purely the evolutionary viewpoint, it is only the physical impacts on biological fitness (survival and reproduction) that count–what natural selection can act on. So whatever emotions go on in one’s head while performing putative altruistic acts (whether we feel stress or joy) are irrelevant-- in an evolutionary sense. However, theologically, what goes on in our hearts as we interact with others is of great importance.
So, taking off my biologist hat for a moment and speculating theologically (wink)… I think that God’s ultimate wish is for relationships of Agape love (between humans and between God and humans), which is not always equivalent to altruism. Altruism seems to me–to be only necessary in an imperfect world where resources are limiting and there is suffering. Here where the world is harsh and enemies threaten, our calling to Agape may require that we self-sacrifice for another. But in the new creation, when there is no longer competition or pain or stress— presumably acts of altruism will no longer exist, and there will be only Agape remaining. And “joy” seems inherent to relationships of love?
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Yes. Those celebrating Sarah Smith were not jealous, but rejoicing in and with her. 
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