At 07:10 AM 12/1/1998 -0600, you wrote:
>John Foster wrote:
>
>> There is a book on the evolutionary origins of virtue by Mat Ridley. The
>> author is a zoologist and essentially states in his book "The Origins of
>> Virture: human instincts and the evolution of cooperation" that there are no
>> examples of altruism in animals.
>
>Odd, I have that book, and I could have sworn that was not the conclusion he
>comes to. Let me look ... here on page 19 he writes: "Some philosophers have
>argued that there cannot be such a thing as animal altruism, because altruism
>must imply a generous motive rather than a generous act." He then goes on to
>refute this notion.
This is odd. My book states this on page 19:
"George Price taught himself genetics in order to disprove Hamilton's stark
conclusion that altruism was just genetic selfishness, but instead proved it
indisuputably correct - indeed, even improved the algebra and made some
important contributions to the theory himself."
Moreover as Ridley points out in the instance above, stating "Only those who
do good out of cold, unmoved conviction are 'true' altruists....In other
words the more you truly feel for people in distress, the more selfish you
are being in alleviating that distress." And Ridley uses the example of
inheritance to explain his selfish gene theory behind altruism. "...one of
the incentives people have to earn wealth is to leave it to their children.
There is no extinquishing this human instinct: with relatively few
exceptions, people try to pass on much of their wealth to the next
generation rather than spend it all, give it to charity or just relinquish
it to be shared with strangers on their death."
Altruism in animals is "genetic selfishness."
jf
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