fifeboy fifeboy:
Chumley Chumley:
Interesting thought. So this book is saying there is a natural tendency for a family member who is or percieves themselves to be inferior in some way to sacrifice thier own self interests more readily to preserve the stronger sibling?
E.O Wilson is an entomologist who works with social insects. I can't remember if this originates with him or not but there is a branch of biology where all this fits called sociobiology which I don't know much about. I read the book years ago (1976) but if I recall it tried to make a case for altruism being driven by a desire to preserve the genes you were most closely associated with. It was also the last I have read on the matter.
Dawkins is also big on this stuff. You can make mathematical calculations of how closely organisms are related genetically vs their engaging in altruistic behaviors. Bees are big on it - they're all sisters working toward the common goal of having their breeding sister produce as many reproducing offspring as possible.
But people have challenged this view - in humans, and also in say dogs giving their life for their owner.
$1:
Sociobiology investigates social behaviors, such as mating patterns, territorial fights, pack hunting, and the hive society of social insects. Just as selection pressure led to animals evolving useful ways of interacting with the natural environment, it led to the genetic evolution of advantageous social behavior.
Sociobiology has become one of the greatest scientific controversies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, especially in the context of explaining human behavior. Applied to non-humans, sociobiology is uncontroversial. Criticism, most notably made by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, centers on sociobiology's contention that genes play an ultimate role in human behavior and that traits such as aggressiveness can be explained by biology rather than a person's social environment. Many sociobiologists, however, cite a complex relationship between nature and nurture. In response to the controversy, anthropologist John Tooby and psychologist Leda Cosmides launched evolutionary psychology as a branch of sociobiology made less controversial by avoiding questions of human biodiversity.