[quote]Cortes wrote:
[quote]forlife wrote:
That’s why I find interspeciel altruism so fascinating. Evolution would favor altruism within the species, but less so between species. And this is what we actually find in the natural world. Animals are generally more altruistic toward members of their own species, and especially toward their own offspring. That is consistent with an evolutionary perspective.
As you point out, cases of intraspeciel violence do exist. But even those cases tend to illustrate an evolutionary influence, for example, wolves killing the old and sick in their pack when food is scarce (they need 5-10 pounds of meat/day to survive).[/quote]
While I happen to be one of those weird heretical hypocritical Christians who believes that evolution is generally probably a decently accurate (though not wholly adequate) way to explain how we got from there to here, (could you see my sentence through all the qualifiers?
I would caution against applying a logical fallacy I see Christian’s accused of all the time. Call it “Darwin of the Gaps.” The underlying assumption among scientifically minded folks appears to be: Evolution Is. Rather than a theory with a number of unanswered problems, it is treated as a fact, and the explanation of every human and animal trait and behavior is crammed into its framework as if no alternative explanations are possible. But for every example you can provide that appears to conform to this model, I can provide an example that confounds it. Male lions will eat their own children. Wolves are a great example as they sometimes kill other wolves when the scarcity motive is inapplicable. Hell, I’ve watched doves at my parents’ house kill another weak or injured dove a number of times, and there sure as shit is no food shortage there, as my dad puts out a ton of food just in his backyard every day (my mom and him actually fight over his feeding the birds because of this very thing, she can’t stand seeing them kill each other).
Sure, you (generally, not you forlife, necessarily) can probably come up with some alternative explanation and say, “See, evolution!” But just because you can doesn’t mean that’s what is. I think there are still plenty of questions that neither science nor evolution is yet able to answer, and, at least for me, the human tendency toward altruism is certainly one of them. [/quote]
You probably know me well enough by now to realize I don’t espouse any hypothesis, scientific or otherwise, as unassailable fact. That goes for evolution, as well as any other theory or law (except, or course, anything that portrays gays in a negative light
In order to work, evolution doesn’t need to get it right every time. It only needs to reward characteristics that tend to contribute to the survival of the species, more often than would be expected by chance alone.
So citing exceptions doesn’t disprove evolution. It only demonstrates that if evolution is real, it operates on a macro scale over a long period of time, by perpetuating certain characteristics with greater frequency than others, while typically not eliminating the undesirable characteristics entirely. It’s even more complicated than that, because some characteristics, like the penchant for violent behavior, could contribute to survival in cases of external threat, while simultaneously hurting survival of that species in cases of internal threat. Not all characteristics are dichotomously helpful or harmful to survival, and indeed I would argue that most aren’t.
The exceptions you cite apply to humans as well, of course. Despite our capacity for altruism, we also have the capacity to rip one another apart. So whatever the source may be, it seems to apply across all species rather than being unique to humans.