Altruism: hardwired

[Charles Brown <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Eugenics" refers to selective breeding of humans (as in the US in the
1920s & 1930s, or in Nazi Germany).

I don't think so. "Social Darwinism" is nothing but old fashioned
_laissez faire_ with a secular version of the old Calvinist twist
("we're better because we're winners").

Sociobiology represents a failed (and silly) effort to explain human
social behavior by analogies with bees and other social creatures.

"Social molecular biology" isn't really what the cited article is
about. The article simply says that are brains are "wired" so that we
get pleasure from empathetic behavior. Empathy isn't morality: my
buddy and I can feel really empathetic with each other at the same
time that we torture someone. (In the classic Milgram experiment, the
subject empathizes with an authority figure and follows orders to
torture a third person.) Morality, by its very nature, is social.

The first three are disgusting ideologies, while the fourth seems a
potential blow against  the commonly-accepted view that people are
simply greedy bastards who look out only for themselves.
--
Jim Devine


^^^^^

CB: Sounds right to me.

I'm thinking that at human origins, the altruism that gave humans the
biggest adaptive advantage is not genetically, but culturally determined, or
even stronger that culture _is_ essentially an altruistic influence on
humans.  The creation of culture, tradition, especially as kinship,
multigenerational altruism _is_ the origin of the human species.  Our
genetic makeup , of course, doesn't contradict culture bearing, and probably
enhances it, but culture-kinship-altruism is not genetically determined, but
only enabled.

The altruism that is a living generation thinking ahead as to how to protect
and enhance and make fertile the lives of future unborn generations, is the
center of original culture.

Since the beginning, though, culture has gone astray, and is infused with
lots of selfishness, such as today's capitalist cultural model of the
"rugged individual."