Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A. A Farm Team, ca. 1812
In my post about Darwin and Prince Kropotkin I quoted from David Sloan Wilson. This is a new concept for me so I would like to write it down as concisely as I can.
- The classic Darwinian evolutionary idea of survival of the fittest. Self interest trumps the interest of others. Two men went into a ring, one left standing.
- But it’s rather obvious that belonging to a strong group could increase your survival odds and therefore altruism and unselfish giving, required for a functional group structure, is also an evolutionary trait. It seems that this aspect of the evolutionary selection was only alluded by Charles Darwin but deemed a heresy by American scientists in the sixties (a huge subject for another day).
The relentless eternal tension is that self interest contradicts group interest. In fact you must sacrifice, even your life, for the benefit of a group. More often a group or a society would only recognize 1st principle and postulate that the human animal needs protection from selfish inclinations by fear. In comes a dictator whose interest is in cultivating the 1st principle and downplaying the 2nd principle. This is also the root of the eternal cynicism about the human nature, when people even in democratic societies long for another Stalin. So you might have a society when a group acts not only contrary to the altruistic principles but even more selfish than a free roaming Neanderthal. When a group betrays its original charter the human animal prefers a group free existence. But it also deprives a person from the genetic evolutionary trait of being altruistic, being giving, being connected to others unselfishly.
Image licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts
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