“How many theorists are advocating the idea that our tendency to evolve in communities, and our tendency toward altruism can best be understood in terms of an essential connectedness between us?”

It’s a question of explaining by reference to facts and reason, rather than to mystic concepts.

When you say ‘our’ tendency I presume you mean humans.

Let us assume that “an essential connectedness between us” is the best way to explain our tendency to evolve in communities and toward altruism. Okay. Now your mission – should you choose to accept it – is to explain how this can be reconciled with the *fact* that we are biological organisms built by replicating molecules, namely DNA.

There’s no point in positing an essential connectedness if it has no basis in fact. That would be mere mystic guff.

But if it has a basis in fact, then it’s got to come out of a particular species of biological organisms, namely humans.

Let’s suppose that a particular individual, motivated by this sense of the common good, were to favour others at his own expense. Then at the margins of subsistence, this kind of behaviour would tend to die out.

The only way this conclusion could be avoided is if the individual *benefited* from his altruistic behaviour. That’s what evolutionary psychology and economics explain.

But you don’t want those explanations, because they are based on fact and reason and individual self-interest.

You want a mystic communal sit-around-the-campfire-and-sing-Kumbaya-type explanation based on a mystical Moloch called society.

Only problem is, so far you seem completely incapable of explaining what your theory is in a way that reconciles with fact or reason. You have neither refuted Darwin’s theory nor proved, or even explained, your own.

Good post Peter, you've sent me into a deep meditation and I don't know where to begin.

"When you say ‘our’ tendency I presume you mean humans."

No, I actually mean that all organisms have that tendency to evolve in communities and toward altruism. As for communities, they are readily observed from the simplest organism to the most complex.

Concerning altruism, that would fit under what I called the motivation toward fairness a little earlier. It results from consciously trying to figure out how to fit in; and we don't need a lot of consciousness to achieve it.

A lot of behaviour such as finding water, feeding, mating etc is best understood as organisms trying to find sensual fulfillment (1st primary motivation that I mentioned earlier). We can look at competition for resources in relation to this, but the more active competition will arise when an organism is able to recognise a competitor and tries to dominate that competitor to it's own advantage. (2nd motive - to control) My science is weak but I suspect that we would be able to recognise this kind of active competition even between such unintelligent organisms as plants.

The third primary motive (empathy) is that it feels good to connect and feels bad to be isolated. (different to sensual feelings and hard to quantify.) I suggest that this empathy exists in even the simplest organisms, recognizable especially within an intra-species community. It is a small step from here to say that actively trying to fit in (through being fair) will be one of the first acts of consciousness of any living organisms.

In this, I suppose that you can recognize an individual benefitting from being a nice member of the community, but it's not driven by self-interest. I think that somewhere in there we can find the answer to my mission: Separate biological organisms existing within communities.

Gilbert

It’s back the front for several reasons.

>A lot of behaviour such as finding water, feeding, mating etc is best understood as organisms trying to find sensual fulfillment (1st primary motivation that I mentioned earlier).

That’s like theorists who said that the function of the orgasm is to give pleasure. The function of a behaviour can’t be to give pleasure. It’s the other way around. Behaviours give pleasure because they are functional. Drinking, eating, making love – these give us pleasure because a) they promote reproductive success, and b) all the ancestral organisms that didn’t get pleasure from them died out.

>No, I actually mean that all organisms have that tendency to evolve in communities and toward altruism.

They don’t. What about the snow leopard or polar bear? Lots of species do not evolve in communities. And those that do, cannot do it if it causes individuals to die out. It’s got to be beneficial to the individual first and foremost.

> Concerning altruism, that would fit under what I called the motivation toward fairness a little earlier.

It’s
a) nonsense, and
b) back the front.

Cows, jackals, kestrels, coral, algae, eucalypts: these don’t have a “motivation to fairness”.

Humans do, but we don’t have societies because we have a motivation to fairness. We have a motivation to fairness because we have societies.

We have societies first and foremost because *labour in co-operation is more productive than labour in isolation*. We have societies because we selfishly benefit more than if we did not have societies. It could not be otherwise without social behaviour dying out. Society is just co-operation by another name.

Empathy can’t just evolve out of the blue, as a feeling motivating society, benefiting others, at cost to the organism that has it. Evolution just doesn’t work that way.

You really should read:
Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
Human Action by Ludwig von Mises

I’m not asking you to agree with them. I’m asking you to understand them.

"So if we combine ecology wth the study of the evoltion of organisms from the perspective of the individual, we would be approaching the dual drivers of natural selection that I spoke about?"

Oh Gilbert, dear lord no. Your first major error is your delineation of two drivers of natural selection, 'cooperation' and 'competition', whereas the real picture is much more complex than that. The second is assuming that "science" either only looks at individuals or the "relation of living organisms to each other and their surroundings", but not both together. Oh please, it's soooo done. To study multiple levels at once? Been around for many decades mate. To look at multiple levels from below the individuals level (genetics) right up to whole landscapes. It is not easy to do at once, but it is attempted.

Sorry Gilbert, but you come across as incredibly unaware of anything except your own ideas. That you seem to be ignorant of what ecology is, and unaware that such a massive scientific field of study even existed.

The first reference in the Wikipedia entry was:

Begon, M.; Townsend, C. R., Harper, J. L. (2006). Ecology: From individuals to ecosystems. (4th ed.). Blackwell.

Sounds like a good read, if you want to write about evolution, don't read Dawkins and Darwin or (cough) Ludwig Von Mises.

Start maybe with that reference first, it sounds like a good read and then move on to something by Ernst Mayr:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_W._Mayr - has a good bibliography of his works.

Or perhaps Stephen Jay Gould:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Gould - which also has a good bibliography.

"Sounds like a good read, if you want to write about evolution, don't read Dawkins and Darwin or (cough) Ludwig Von Mises."

He's not just wanting to write about evolution. He's drawing a long bow and trying to cover biological evolution, human psychology, human society, metaphysics, systems theory, taoism, and so on, including purporting to arrive at an explanation of the civil rights movement, the environmental movement and feminism, as well as free trade versus regulated trade. And he's trying to do it based on an idea of a general polarity between the concepts of individuality/competition on the one hand, and communality/co-operation on the other.

While natural scientists may scoff at the confusion or mysticism in his thought, they themselves are some of the worst offenders when it comes to considering social and economic phenomena, constantly introducing mystic concepts through the back door by way of a supposition of the state's assumed godlike qualities. Thus the state is assumed to be a superbeing over and above selfish human interests. The state is assumed to be able to rationalise scarce resources among myriad competing values without any material explanation of *how* it's going to do it. The state is assumed to have knowledge that is literally dispersed in the subjective evaluations of millions of people and which cannot ever be centralised. The state is assumed to transcend selfish motives, as if self-interest suddenly did not affect people on applying for a job exercising monopoly coercive power; etc.

A classic example of this mysticism by modern natural scientists is the whole AGW business. Even if the climatological premises were conceded - and they are much better explained by the corruption of science by government - the community of scientists behind it have made a complete non sequitur, involving all the above irrational assumptions, reposing a blind faith in government to manage the entire climate and economy, that has no basis in reality or reason; and has been definitively refuted by Mises and the Austrian school.

Thanks for your input Bugsy and Peter especially. I am going away for a few days, but can do another post if necessary on maybe Monday night.

"Conflation of a number of completely different concepts..."

I can see that I could have been more careful to delineate how various mechanisms of evolution work while still keeping them within the basic competitive/cooperative pattern of evolution that I believe in.

I am and was fully aware that ecology exists Bugsy. I would say that the emergence of ecology could be seen as part of the emerging 'new paradigm'. The wiki link says, "The modern synthesis of ecology is a young science, which first attracted substantial formal attention at the end of the 19th century."

Peter,
"Lots of species do not evolve in communities."

Some are definitely more communal than others. There is huge diversity resulting from natural selection, but that some species do not exist in strong community and some do indicates to me an interplay between the dual drivers of evolution that I mentioned. Sometimes one will be stronger, sometimes the other.

"Empathy can’t just evolve out of the blue."

I am suggesting that empathy is one of the starting points of evolution, resulting from an essential connectedness between us.

Got to go!