The Drive For Altruism Is Hardwired 582
Dekortage writes "The Washington Post is reporting on recent neuroscience research indicating that the brain is pre-wired to enjoy altruism — placing the interests of others ahead of one's own. In studies, '[G]enerosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex... Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.' Such research 'has opened up a new window on what it means to be good,' although many philosophers over recorded history have suggested similar things."
Re:Guilt and altruism (Score:3, Informative)
So even if the moral compass is in-built, it only activates in the presence of others.
Well what would it mean to be altruistic outside the presence of others? Someone else needs to be involved somehow, or else there can be no object of the altruism. What I mean is that the object of altruism must always be "others", so without "others", there's no possibility of altruism or selfishness.
Get out the flamethrowers (Score:2, Informative)
My criticism of the article is that much of it is retreads old studies that have looked at how people with certain forms of brain damage are less empathic than the average person. Ergo logically an undamaged brain has a higher empathy/altruistic level and that is a GOOD thing. Which others extrapolate to pointing towards the existence of God, etc.
Of more interest to me is the fact that they now have done detailed brainwave pattern analysis that showed that a "horrible" AKA evil decision sets off a mental storm between parts of the brain. From what I can determine, this storm between parts doesn't happen when a so-called "good" (altruistic) decision is to be made. Which could be construed to be a form of "hard wired" design except for one problem: Socio-pathic individuals don't seem to suffer from the mental storm. Which then leads me to another interesting question: why do normal individuals react with visceral horror to a person known to be sociopath but not to an undetected one, where some extremely attuned individuals who will react with the same visceral horror to the sociopath even when they do not know whom they are interacting with?
It is as if the very concept of differentiating the so called morally good choices from morally reprehensible choices seems to part and parcel of the human organism as well as the social implications of following those implications (admiring the saint, shunning the baby killer) -- and that -- for me is an indicator of design, not evolution.
In KJV speak, then Slashdotters, what think ye?
Re:Ethics. (Score:3, Informative)
The point is that you shouldn't be passing moral judgements universally.
Moral relativists don't believe "morals are meaningless", they believe they're relative. So, when the society you live decided that murder is a "bad" thing, everyone that participates in your society agrees to this rule in exchange for the benefits of living in a society where you are protected from being murdered by the other members of that society. If someone breaks the rules of that society, they get excluded (go to jail). In other words, morals aren't meaningless and in the society you and I live in murder is properly defined and we agree that it is wrong to murder.
No moral relativist is going to claim you need to abolish laws that punish those who commit murder because "murder might be ok to that person". Moral relativists will merely claim that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with murder, but rather it's a rule our society came up with because we benefit from having that rule. So we should stop passing moral judgements on societies that have agreed upon different rules. If anyone in our society thinks murder is ok, they should move to a society that shares his moral values, or suffer the consequences of breaking the rules of ours.
The consequence of that for individual morals is that society shouldn't have rules that don't benefit society as a whole. A law against murder is an obvious example of something that benefits our society. Laws prohibiting, say...homosexuality for example, do not. They merely prohibit people who see nothing wrong with it from engaging in those acts. The moral relativist is going to argue that it's fine for you to think homosexuality is wrong, but it's not ok for you to pass judgement on those who don't agree with you unless their actions somehow affect you personally.
Re:Call it what you will (Score:3, Informative)
You share 50% of your genes with your child (jokes aside), and therefore it is an expected benefit to your genes of valuing your child's life 50% of yours. Kids don't grow up and reproduce if you don't do the stuff you are doing, so you are hardwired for that. Same thing is true for brothers, cousins, tribal hunter gatherer members, etc. (To lesser extent as you get less and less related.)
TFA is talking about finding that humans are not making the pure rational decisions (like the examples above) and it is hard wired. Adding a proto-human to a large extended society reveals that somehow people do good stuff, despite all the 'cold calculations' saying they should choose otherwise.
The fact they found this means a whole branch of sociological philosophizing is radically changed.
If my own experience is correct, they will keep finding examples of these all over. Some time last year someone found how the brain of an adult male got stimulated in similar ways to drugs with visual input of an attractive sexual object. (Explaining why men seek out porn, sometimes for it's own sake beyond getting one's rocks off and while the actors are not accessible to them.) Porn is a side effect of that hard wiring.
The societies that had people hard wired to be altruistic did better. So this is a case where one can point to a behavior and say it has evolved via group selection, rather than trying to break it down to "why is it good for me" in some sort of convoluted logic because of an unwillingness to let go of the idea that the actors are doing rational calculations. (They're not, its just the ones that didn't act that way didn't reproduce as well and no longer exist.)
Move along, nothing new here (Score:3, Informative)
Peter Kropotkin [wikipedia.org] pointed this out [amazon.co.uk] over 100 years ago
Re:Why do conservatives donate more? (Score:5, Informative)
For a quick overview of this there is a nice WikiPedia entry [wikipedia.org].
Read The Selfish Gene (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hold up... technical foul (Score:3, Informative)
I see I mis-spelled Cyphre, as well.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092563/ [imdb.com]
Re:Easily Explained (Score:3, Informative)
Not really. There actually is plenty of archaeological evidence that humans lived in small bands. That's really not that hard to imagine as large populations need to have agriculture to sustain themselves. So hunter-gatherers need to live in small tribes limited by the carrying capacity of the land around them (as they still do today in remote parts of the world). An ancient "great city" would have needed to vaporize *all* traces of it's existence, down to every last kernel of grain or piece of pottery.
His idea of altruism being selected based to mutual benefit of those who are related isn't some idea cooked up out of nowhere, it actually comes from game theory. The problem is once you get into larger populations, those around you less and less related, so you're less likely to help "your" genes. Personally I'm more of a "Red-Queen" believer, where altruism is selected for by sexual-selection (i.e. being a kind, sharing person makes you attractive to potential mates who are looking for someone to stick around a help raise children).