My original question in this forum was not about whether human altruism exists (I actually think it does because humans have the free-will ability to consciously override their evolutionary-derived inclinations), but whether it has been shown to exist in other animals (i.e., whether it can be selected for by evolution). So far as I am aware, there is no confirmed evidence for it in animals (e.g., that can’t be explained by reciprocity or by mutual cooperation where there is a net gain to both participants). I still haven’t run across any examples.
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Oh, and my main interest in this question comes not from any pressure from seminary professors, but my own training and career as a scientist in the field of animal behaviour and evolutionary ecology. I like to keep up on the literature and debates on this interesting topic, and hope to dispel some of the fog around terminology which has caused a lot of confusion in this area—also in the scientific literature.
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I guess I’ll go with what the primatologist told me.
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Yes. Slime molds and blades of grass are composed of cells. Cells repair damage and supply the needs of the parts of the cell. It cannot do that if it is not aware of the damage or those needs. Now in the case of a cell that information is chemical rather than neurological. A nervous system is only needed to transmit information over long distances in large multicellular organisms.
“Self” is word. Words are components of language. Only organisms with language use words. Language can be used to transmit information over larger distances than a nervous system.
And it is not just distances but many other kinds of quantitative differences which mean a much greater consciousness as well.
I think it is consciousness. It is just not linguistic or neurological. It is a LOT LESS consciousness to be sure… but consciousness nevertheless.
They not only react to the environment but also to their own internal states. Thus they have both awareness of the environment and self-awareness.
I fear you conflate sensing and self-awareness.
I fear you conflate living organisms with machines.
The sensors in machines send signals because they were designed to do so. Cells send signals from one part to the other as a result of the self-organizing processes of life like evolution.
Just because the sensing and signaling mechanisms are different does not confer selfhood.
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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