I think "survival" in evolutionary terms doesn't mean what we think it means in everyday terms. I think "survival" means living long enough and in a manner to pass on your genes. I'm thinking of, say, the sickle cell mutation. This is beneficial to the host to the extent that it will allow the host to live long enough to breed (despite having malaria), although it will eventually kill the host.

Evolution doesn't work to make anyone comfortable or give them the longest possible life. It works to make them have the greatest chance of passing on their genetic material.

I'm not sure whether altruism is a good choice of words to describe, for example, what honey bees do for their queens and for their hives. Despite the intent, it does have the anthropomorpic overtone. But despite that it might make for confusion, the term is in wide use and I don't know that it's worth the effort to fight the tide on this one.

Sometimes, it's not clear what is genetic and what is not genetic - even what it means to have a "genetic predisposition." I saw a TV program some years ago about birds. They all looked alike to me, but they represented different species of "something." Interesting observation. These different species which looked pretty much all alike to my untrained eye (though it's likely the experts could tell the difference), these species all have different songs. They did some very simple experiments to understand whether the songs were genetic or learned. They took some eggs of one species and moved them to another species. What they observed:

1. The birds who were moved did not spontaneously learn the songs from their species - so the song wasn't hereditary.

2. The birds who were moved could not learn the songs of the species they were born into (their adopted species) - so the song wasn't learned.

Well what was it then? It was just a little more complicated. While the song was not completely hereditary or completely learned, it was clear to the researches that both of these played an important role. The birds obviously had a "genetic predisposition" for a particular song, but wouldn't learn that song unless exposed to it.

(I'm vague on this - as I said it was a few years ago that I saw the program - but I seem to recall that not only did the moved birds not learn their own species' song, but they COULD NEVER learn the song if they were later moved to be with their own species.)

Honey bee behavior is almost certainly purely hereditary. This particular bird behavior seems clearly a mix of the two. But human behavior - I think this is what the crux of the argument between sociobiologists and their opponents. I don't think they (the SBs) would assert that our behavior is determined, so much as limited in some way - that people, while malleable, are not perfectly malleable.

An example is the human conception is beauty. Ever since Meade and probably before we have believed that anything goes with respect to beauty, that it's utterly in the eye of the beholder, that it's almost completely determined by culture. But some people believe they have found threads of commonality between these superficially very different conceptions of beauty. Furthermore, they've done tests that "measure" people's subjective reaction to beauty, and discovered that the results aren't completely determined by culture, that our conceptions of beauty is not entirely dependent on culture. Of course this assumes that their methodology is good and their conclusions correct.

I don't know what the bottom line is with these things, let alone how it will turn out. I do think some of the results are suspicious (and I'm really big on results making sense and I'm not going to bend over just because some know-it-all in a lab coat tells me my reality isn't real), but I reiterate that from what I've seen of this kind of work it doesn't seem any more untrustworthy than sociology or psychology. That's not a great recommendation, of course, and I don't mean it to be.

k