| > increased genetic interest This only makes sense if you think the individual is the primary site of selection pressure. It need not be. In fact, it probably isn't. Genes compete and cooperate with each other across populations. An example of selection pressure that is supported beyond the interest of one individual's reproductive success is the gay uncle hypothesis: Kin selection means that genes that favor a group's reproduction while dooming an individual member's chances can be successful. In a social species like Homo Sapiens it is far too naive to examine fitness at the level of individuals. Our fitness is a function on ensembles of human beings, not just individuals. How the fitness of an individual and the groups they belong to are related is deep and fascinating. Cooperation and collectivism are as much our essence as competition and individualism. There is no dichotomy between them. We are related to both Chimpanzees and Bonobos. Anyway, this relates to your reasoning in this way: A group of human beings who freely procreate with each other and maximizing paternal uncertainty maximize their mutual interest. Such a reproductive strategy strongly selects for behaviors that maximize group cohesion and mutuality. If we assume a reproductive strategy, the set of behaviors and their underlying genetics gain fitness relative to that reproductive strategy. A reproductive strategy that emphasizes the propagation of individual's genes specifically works well with genes that favor individualistic behavior while a reproductive strategy that emphasizes the propagation of a coherent population's genes works well with genes that favor collectivist behavior. The converse implication holds as well. The population of human beings and the genes that are distributed amongst it are not driven by one master impulse, but instead ebb and flow according to external and purely human pressures. If a dictatorship arose tomorrow and instituted collective breeding, that would be quite a tumultuous change in pressures for individualism and against collectivism. Human nature is in a non-linear feedback loop. Take a coherent set of behaviors and the genes that support them. Take another set that are at odds with those behaviors. You can ask how those evolve as if they were competing as organisms. There are no clean lines drawn in biology. Genes propagate and evolve, organisms propagate and evolve, populations of organisms propagate and evolve, ecosystems propagate and evolve, behaviors propagate and evolve. So what I'm trying to say in a long-winded way is that your focus on individual interest is much too narrow and misses the forest for the trees. |
European-style civilization is probably not possible without it, as I expect we will soon learn.