Reddit reviews The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation

Anthropology discovered this like a hundred years ago, yet the discussion and consideration is completely absent from pop culture. If you have a basic 8th grade understanding of biology (egg and sperm) it does seem like men have a motivation to fuck and flee. But when you consider human evolution, it doesn't make sense. But pop culture always gives in to the lowest common denominator (most people don't even believe in human evolution, let alone have studied it).

Human children are born dependent and stay dependent for many years, requiring multiple caregivers. Fuck and flee would ensure the death of a man's children in most cases, so there is no incentive to do that. Humans are extremely social and community is very important for our survival, happiness, and intellectual satisfaction. Fuck and flee severs trust and closeness, which are important to someone who relies on altruism for survival.

If men were programmed for infidelity, our early ancestors would have lived like lions (all the females together raising the kids, while an occasional male would stop by and knock them up). But that's not how we have ever lived. There is evidence of pair bonding in our ancestors back 4 million years, before the Homo Sapiens even existed.

For more reading on this, check out The Origins of Virtue. I read it in one of my anthropology classes in college, and it was a student favorite. It discusses the evolution of community in many species.

You might find Matt Ridley's "Origins of Virtue" to be pretty interesting.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Origins-Virtue-Instincts-Cooperation/dp/0140264450

His interpretation is that many times (this is not specific to women in any way) one group may "take one for the team" because in the end, they end up with a better deal than any other options.

To put it in the context of the scenario you mention, perhaps they felt getting SOMEONE in their family voting sooner was better than a more prolonged and possibly less successful battle for their own personal voting rights.

I'm not saying you're wrong. A lot of women get screwed over by the world. I'm just saying, the world is a nasty place for humans and sometimes women may have made a "pragmatic" decision by choosing a "less screwed" option. Ridley and others argue that (for men or women) the ultimate Darwinian measuring stick of our brief time on Earth may simply be the success and vitality of our children. It's why men go to war (and do a lot of other terrible things to) and it might also be why women let themselves get thrown under the bus. Because if they're making the world better for their children, in the grand scheme of things, it's a win.

Flame me if you will.

Try this ... Ridley goes into games theory and computing as well as evolution to explore the origins of unselfish behavior. A riveting and surprisingly hopeful, hard science exploration.
http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Virtue-Instincts-Evolution-Cooperation/dp/0140264450/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1348738525&sr=1-1&keywords=the+origins+of+virtue

OK.

The single best evo-psych book I can think of is

The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker. It's extremely readable as well as very informative.

Where you'd want to go next depends on what you'd like to learn more about, and whether you liked Stephen Pinker as an author.

If you'd like to know more about the genetics that underlying the evo-psych then you want.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

If you're interested specifically in what evo-psych has to say about human sexuality you want

The Evolution of Desire by David Buss

And if you really like Stephen Pinker and want to know what evo psych means for human societies I'd recommend

The Angels of our Better Nature by Stephen Pinker

or (if you don't like Pinker)

Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley.

I've given you US Amazon links, and no. I don't get a cut :(

I suggest

• Matt Ridley's 'The Origins of Virtue', and
  
• Michael Shermer's 'The Science of Good and Evil'

You should check out the book The Origins of Virtue. It's all about our evolutionary past and where our altruistic impulses come from.

Much of what we would call altruism is actually just the expectation of payment in a different form - prestige, reciprocity, or just a good feeling. Chimps and many other animals have these same tendencies. Voluntary altruism, among primates or the rest of the animal kingdom, is not unique to humans.

A couple of good books that look at this:

The Moral Animal
by Robert Wright

The Origins of Virtue
by Matt Ridley

Braintrust
by Patricia Churchland

Ridley looks specifically at the evolution of cooperation. Wright considers a broader range of questions - for instance he looks at sexual mores and customs - ie. polygyny and monogamy, why men care much more about sexual fidelity than women do, etc. If I had my copy here I could probably find some more to point out and provide some of his ideas.... It's a great book (I also highly recommend his book Nonzero). Churchland specifically gets into the neuroscience of morality.

Adam Smith wrote a book called Theory of Moral Sentiments that described human nature in a way that would be familiar to many socialists. We are altruistic, compassionate, cooperative, and loving. Humans don't act like homo economicus in our daily lives. All of this is complementary to and compatible with Smith's description of man as a self-interested being, which most people are familiar with because of his much more famous book, Wealth of Nations. These aspects of human nature are, in fact, what make capitalism work so well.

Good books on the subject:

How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness by Russ Roberts. This book is brand new and excellent.

The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation by Matt Ridley

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

Evolution is simply the science of how we got here and except for debunking theistic claims to the contrary (which calls into question all their other claims) doesn't provide much in the way of ethical guidelines. But, if I'm guessing correctly about where you're headed take a look at Matt Ridley's book The Origins of Virtue. It does a pretty good job of explaining how we evolved our sense of moral behavior.

It is thought that altruistic behavior is actually innate and passed down genetically and thus a product of natural selection, it's part of our survival behavior that actually got us (a bunch of pretty weak apes) this far...

Here's a great book on the genetics and altruism Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley

You picked the wrong villain. Money is just a way of facilitating trade of scarce items. We can easily trade if I have a goat you want and you have some cotton I want. But when more people are introduced with items (eg someone else has some steel, another person has some paper etc) then direct barter gets too complicated and you can use money to work it out instead. Scarce items is the other important point - you won't find it possible to exchange money for items of an almost unlimited supply.

If you want to avoid trade completely then you will need some sort of communal environment, although you'll find it necessary for the community to trade outside of that environment. Two examples are a kibbutz and communism.

You could eliminate money by not having anything be scarce or at least for there to be no scarcity and being totally self supporting within a community. Generally people cooperate and are virtuous when around people most like them - there is a genetic reason for doing so. The less you are like them the more incentive there is to gain an advantage over others (greed etc).

> because it increases the chances they will be treated well.

Actually, I think you're right and this is an even better theory. I'd attribute it to Matt Ridley, who I read on this topic some 10 years ago. (I don't know if he was the first to talk about altruism evolutionarily.)

Ridley's book includes some discussion of game theory, and how the various permutations of "tit for tat" show up in the animal kingdom. I think he showed that chimpanzees follow "Tit for Tat with forgiveness" behavior.

> DNA is essentially the driving force behind evolution

In our limited realm of experience, DNA is the primary actor in evolution (the driving force seems like a term better applied to selective pressure). And DNA is really great! But it's conceivable that some other molecule exists out there that can self-replicate and can sometimes make mistakes to allow for adaptation.

We've also been doing research for a couple of decades now into evolutionary programming, whereby a program makes a lot of copies of its own code with minor tweaks and then the resulting copies get tested against some rubric (e.g. how fast or accurately can you solve this problem). The loser copies are culled to gradually develop programs that fit the testing criteria much more closely than the original and can solve the test problems in unexpected ways.

> Better yet, could altruism be an evolutionarily successful trait in a universe with selfish genes?

Matt Ridley wrote a book about exactly this called The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation. The short answer is 'yes'; there are examples of altruism all over the Animal kingdom (I can't remember any about fungi or plants, but they might be in there), and there can be advantages to being altruistic even when there are selfish bastards in the same realm looking to exploit that.

(note: Matt Ridley is a pretty conservative dude and draws some near-nihilistic conclusions toward the end of the book, but I still think he's a great science writer when he's citing sources rather than providing political commentary).