Sublime

A part of Dawkins’s purpose was to explain altruism: behavior in individuals that goes against their own best interests. Nature is full of examples of animals risking their own lives in behalf of their progeny, their cousins, or just fellow members of their genetic club. Furthermore, they share food; they cooperate in building hives and dams; they

Le Gène égoïste, de Richard Dawkins, explique mieux la vie (y compris les comportements humains et les individus) que tout autre ouvrage que j’ai pu lire.

But in the very next paragraph, Darwin raised the free rider problem, which is still the main objection raised against group selection: But it may be asked, how within the limits of the same tribe did a large number of members first become endowed with these social and moral qualities, and how was the standard of excellence raised? It is extremely

In a few remarkable pages of The Descent of Man, Darwin made the case for group selection, raised the principal objection to it, and then proposed a way around the objection: When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if (other circumstances being equal) the one tribe included a great number of courageous, s

I do believe that you can understand most of moral psychology by viewing it as a form of enlightened self-interest, and if it’s self-interest, then it’s easily explained by Darwinian natural selection working at the level of the individual. Genes are selfish,3 selfish genes create people with various mental modules, and some of these mental modules

But the most important “stimulus to the development of the social virtues” was the fact that people are passionately concerned with “the praise and blame of our fellow-men.”16 Darwin, writing in Victorian England, shared Glaucon’s view (from aristocratic Athens) that people are obsessed with their reputations. Darwin believed that the emotions that