(Click through for full sized version and for the red button caption.) via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Of course, as we discussed on the Selfish Gene post, even if we are acting completely altruistically at a conscious level, our impulse to do so is broadly tied up with evolutionary survival advantages.
Tag: Altruism
This View of Life: The Evolution of Fairness
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOtlN4pNArk Brosnan and de Waal’s finding of fairness in the capuchin monkey has settled the long-standing question of whether animals have a sense of fairness and further blurred the line between humans and other animals in a new territory: the sphere of morality. *** The questions now are how fairness works and why it evolved. … Continue reading This View of Life: The Evolution of Fairness
Evolution and altruism
In this episode, a question that haunted Charles Darwin: if natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, how do you explain why one creature might stick its neck out for another? The standard view of evolution is that living things are shaped by cold-hearted competition. And there is no doubt that today\'s plants … Continue reading Evolution and altruism