Capfka, Wsieber, et al...
This debate is stemming from a confusion between two celar kinds of altruism - Behavioural altruism and Psychological alrtuism.
The latter is studied to death only in humans; Jackie's question was specifically referring to this kind. She mentioned persons in her question. It is only with humans that you can study the psychology of motives and whether altruism is subjective or not... Is someone 'really, genuinely' selfless or is there a subliminal underlying motive?
With animals, the effort is to study the biololgy of altruism. The behavioural consequences. As in, what is the 'effect' of an altruistic action on an individual and on the herd.
It is because we, in our language, ascribe all sorts of sentiments to words such as altruism, selfishness, selflessness, that we get upset when the poor (much derided in these columns!) biologists, use similar words to explain behaviour. Let us take the case of a mother bird who tries to distract a predator from its young, by attracting attention to herself. All we can see is the behaviour of the bird and the effect. Not the intent. Did the baby birds survive as a result? Are all the birds of her flock indulging in the same behaviour and are the little birds being saved? Nobody is trying to assess the intent of the birds, though tremendous strides have been made in animal cognition studies. If the babies survive, the mother bird has hit upon a successful strategy. It is a successul propagation strategy and will not be flushed down the gene drain.
Evolution is built around survival and not any old survival either. It chooses wilfully, the best, the brightest, the fittest. And that is why the hapless biologist is trying so hard to see, what it is that the brightest has that gives it its favoured status. And invariably, it is a stronger survival strategy.
Altruism in biological terms is helping another at expense to oneself. Practically, if every life form did this, and behaved according to this underlying principle, then everybody will remove themselves from the gene pool, wouldn't they? And so, altruism is not a successful survival strategy and is not favoured by evolution. The biologist is only trying to interpret the continued survival of birds, insects, humans and others as a vote against altruism.
We have to TEACH our children to be good, kind, helpful, polite, etc., don't we? It isn't the other way around.
