Human Selfishness and Altruism Coexist in Collective Selection

Coexistence of Human Selfishness and Altruism in Collective Choice You have written a personal reflection.

 

Are you selfish or altruistic? The simple answer is that we are both selfish and altruistic. This coexistence of selfishness and altruism comes naturally to us. However, it’s hard to explain this coexistence in evolutionary terms. According to natural selection, only individuals with the traits that are best suited to their environment survive in that environment, and altruistic behaviors are less suited to the environment than selfish behaviors that maximize their own benefit because they are self-destructive. In the end, according to evolutionary theory, only selfish individuals are left. However, altruism is clearly all around us. To explain this altruism, scientists have developed several hypotheses. One of them, the group selection hypothesis, is important in explaining the altruism of humans as social animals because it looks at the evolutionary process from a group perspective instead of an individual perspective. Let’s look at the group selection hypothesis.
Natural selection is divided into individual selection and group selection. The natural selection we mentioned earlier is individual-centered and is called “individual selection”. According to individual selection, individuals with selfish traits are more likely to survive than those with altruistic traits because they maximize their own interests. However, what if natural selection were to occur in a population? Would a group of selfish people or a group of altruistic people be better suited to the environment? This type of natural selection is known as group selection. Under group selection, altruistic behavior is “socially beneficial,” so altruistic groups are better suited to the environment than selfish groups. For example, in a war between groups, the altruistic group is more likely to defeat the selfish group because the altruistic group has more brave and sacrificial warriors.
Now consider a situation where both individual and collective selection are occurring simultaneously: according to individual selection, selfishness will survive, and according to collective selection, altruism will survive. Therefore, for altruism to survive in this process, collective selection must occur faster than individual selection. And the fact that altruism survives means that collective selection is happening faster than individual selection, or at least at a similar rate.
Consider a tribal society that shares food. If selfish and altruistic people coexist within a tribe, then individual selection within the group will leave only selfish people. The selfless people share their food with others, but the selfish people only take food from these selfless people and don’t share their own, so the selfless people get poorer and the selfish people get richer. Eventually, the selfless people starve to death, and only the selfish people remain. Within a tribe of these selfish people, if they can’t harvest their own food, they die.
However, if there is a tribe of selfless people among the many tribes, they will help each other to survive. Even if you are weak, old, or orphaned, you can still get food, so more people can live together than in a tribe of selfish people. So, overall, there may be more selfless people than selfish people. This is because a single selfless tribe can have a very large population, even if there are more selfish tribes. Thus, when individual selection and collective selection occur simultaneously, altruism is likely to increase overall, and altruism may coexist with selfishness over time without disappearing.
In this way, the group selection hypothesis provides an evolutionary explanation for the altruism we see around us. However, some scholars believe that group selection is only logically possible, and that it is difficult for group selection to keep up with individual selection in the real world. However, unlike animals, humans have “institutions” that can slow down individual selection. In the previous example, in the absence of institutions, if there were selfish people in an altruistic tribe, the selfish people would have more food, which would accelerate individual selection. However, the altruistic tribe can introduce a system of communal ownership of resources so that even if there are selfish people in the tribe, they cannot have more food than others, thus stopping the progression of individual selection, leaving only selfish people. In other words, altruism can coexist with selfishness through collective selection because humans are social animals that live in groups (broadly, nations, and narrowly, families) and can slow down individual selection through institutions within the group.