Is altruism more advantageous as a strategy for groups than individuals?

Explain how altruistic behavior is maintained in society through theories of natural selection and group selection. It explores how altruistic behavior contributes to the survival and prosperity of groups, even when selfish behavior is advantageous to the individual, highlighting the role of institutions and cultural transmission.

 

Once upon a time, there were both short-necked and long-necked giraffes. Long-necked giraffes were better suited to survive because they needed to be able to easily reach prey at high elevations in order to survive. After many years of competition and evolution, the long-necked giraffe eventually thrived. We’ve all heard the story before. It’s one of the best examples of ‘natural selection’. Natural selection means that the traits that are best suited to the environment at the time survive in that environment. Over time, it is common for the number of individuals with the best traits to increase and the number of individuals without the best traits to decrease.
To understand the concept of natural selection, let’s look at another example. The finches of the Galapagos Islands have developed different beak shapes depending on the environment of each island. On some islands, birds with stronger beaks were advantageous for eating hard seeds, while on others, they needed sharp, slender beaks to catch small insects. Individuals that adapted to their environment survived and reproduced, passing on their traits to their descendants. This process illustrates a key principle of natural selection.
If a trait is good for a culture, the number of individuals with that trait will increase, a process known as individual selection. Let’s apply this to selfishness and altruism. First of all, altruistic behaviors are less successful than selfish behaviors, because altruistic behaviors involve sacrificing oneself to help others, and selfish behaviors involve more harm than good. Therefore, according to the theory of natural selection, there should be fewer and fewer altruistic individuals. However, altruistic behavior is not uncommon in today’s society. The reason why altruistic behavior is still happening in society despite the fact that it’s against natural selection is because it’s directed at individuals.
This leads us to the theory of group selection, where traits that are beneficial to the group will survive longer. In the simplest example, imagine two villages, one with many altruistic people and the other with many selfish people. Over time, the altruistic village will survive longer because it will be easier for the altruistic village to help each other solve the problems it faces, such as natural disasters and wars. Thus, while individual selection theory suggests that altruistic individuals will diminish, collective selection theory suggests that altruistic individuals will increase.
In theory, group selection could be explained as the mechanism that maintains altruistic behavior, but in reality, individual selection is likely to act more quickly. This brings us to the question of speed: which theory has a faster selection process? If individual selection is faster, there will be fewer and fewer altruistic individuals, and if group selection is faster, there will be more and more altruistic individuals. However, in general, the speed of collective selection does not keep up with the speed of individual selection when the number of individuals is large.
How can we explain the existence of altruistic individuals? It can be explained by increasing the rate of collective selection and slowing down the rate of individual selection, which is what institutions do. Imagine two people playing a game. If person A wins all 100 games out of 100, most people will want to know his strategy and follow it. If, on the other hand, some kind of restriction allows A to win 55 out of 100 games and his opponent wins 45, fewer people will want to know his strategy than in the previous situation. Here’s another example. Consider an agrarian society in its natural state without any institutions. Over time, the prosperity of selfish individuals would lead to rampant wealth inequality, which would further extinguish altruistic individuals, creating a vicious cycle. However, the difference between the wealth of selfish and altruistic individuals can be reduced through methods such as co-ownership of resources and food sharing, which function as a device for income redistribution policies. In other words, the speed of individual choice is slowed down. The key point is that if a society can reduce the gap between people through institutions or services, the pressure of individual choice is reduced, and the rate at which people with altruistic behavioral strategies disappear is reduced.
There is something that plays the same role as “institutions,” and that is “conformist cultural transmission. In the example in the previous paragraph, it’s easy to accept that most people follow the dominant person. Let’s call this dominant person, the one we aim to follow, the “model”. As we saw in the previous example, we typically set a model and follow it if its strategy is superior. The way we set up this model will have different results. If we assume a randomized model, the proportion of people who have a strategy and choose that strategy as their model will be constant. However, we never set up the model randomly, but rather somewhat biased: if more than half of the people have a strategy, then the proportion of people who choose that strategy as their model is greater than this proportion, and conversely, if less than half of the people have a strategy, then the proportion of people who choose that strategy as their model is less than this proportion. A simple example of this is that in a public poll, if the majority of people vote for an item, those who didn’t vote will be more likely to vote for that item. This is known as conformist cultural transmission. Applying this to altruism, we can say that altruistic behavior will flourish faster in a group if more than half of the individuals are altruistic, which means that the effect of group selection has increased.
Furthermore, in human societies, the development of language and communication plays an important role in the spread of altruism. Through language, we can praise altruistic behavior, and through stories, we can convey the importance of altruistic behavior. This has a huge impact on reinforcing altruistic behavior within a group. For example, if we hear stories of people helping people in need in our community, and if the behavior is admired, others will emulate it.
So far, we’ve seen how seemingly unviable altruistic behaviors persist through group selection theory. Would you follow a selfish person? Would you follow the selfish person or the altruistic person, and if so, what would be the outcome of that choice? I hope this article has given you a lot to think about. I hope it reminds you that altruistic behavior is more than just a survival strategy for individuals; it has a profound impact on the survival and prosperity of our societies and communities.