[MD] example of reciprocal altruism?

[Platt Holden]

Hi KO, Craig, Marsha, All:

A couple of monkeys behaving with reciprocity in a zoo is hardly evidence 
of our inheriting a spirit of cooperation from our animal ancestors. In 
fact, our closest monkey relatives, the chimpanzees, "formed hunting 
posses" in the wild and "tore baby baboons they captured limb from limb and 
seemed to enjoy it." -- Lionel Tiger, professor of anthropology, Rutgers 
University, WSJournal, 12/27/08 .

Pirsig also presented less than a heartwarming picture of our evolutionary 
inheritance:

"What the Metaphysics of Quality indicates is that the twentieth-century 
intellectual faith in man's basic goodness as spontaneous and natural is 
disastrously naive. The ideal of a harmonious society in which everyone 
without coercion cooperates happily with everyone else for the mutual good 
of all is a devastating fiction.

"Studies of bones left by the cavemen indicate that cannibalism, not 
cooperation, was a pre-society norm. Primitive tribes such as the American 
Indians have no record of sweetness and cooperation with other tribes. They 
ambushed them, tortured them, dashed their children's brains out on rocks. 
If man is basically good, then maybe it is man's basic goodness which 
invented social institutions to repress this land of biological savagery in 
the first place. (Lila, 24)

This reminded me of the phrase "thin veneer of civilization." When I 
entered it in Google the following passage quickly came to the fore:

"Civilization (which is part of the circle of his imaginings) has spread a 
veneer over the surface of the softshelled animal known as man. It is a 
very thin veneer; but so wonderfully is man constituted that he squirms on 
his bit of achievement and believes he is garbed in armor-plate.

"Yet man to-day is the same man that drank from his enemy's skull in the 
dark German forests, that sacked cities, and stole his women from 
neighboring clans like any howling aborigine. The flesh-and-blood body of 
man has not changed in the last several thousand years. Nor has his mind 
changed. There is no faculty of the mind of man to-day that did not exist 
in the minds of the men of long ago

"It is the same old animal man, smeared over, it is true, with a veneer, 
thin and magical, that makes him dream drunken dreams of self-exaltation 
and to sneer at the flesh and the blood of him beneath the smear. The raw 
animal crouching within him is like the earthquake monster pent in the 
crust of the earth. As he persuades himself against the latter till it 
arouses and shakes down a city, so does he persuade himself against the 
former until it shakes him out of his dreaming and he stands undisguised, a 
brute like any other brute."

http://www.erblist.com/erbmania/nkima/veneer.html

All of which has led me to reiterate Pirsig's stern advice to today's 
intellectuals:

"Where biological values are undermining social values intellectuals must 
identify social behavior, not matter its ethnic connection, and support it 
all the way without restraint. Intellectuals must find biological behavior, 
no matter what its ethnic connection, and limit or destroy destructive 
biological patterns with complete moral ruthlessness., the way a doctor 
destroys germs, before those biological patterns destroy civilization 
itself." (Lila, 24)

Our civilization is under attack. Will our "intellectual" leaders heed 
Pirsig's advice? I have my doubts. We shall see.

Platt


> Yes, you are right Craig but people behave altruistically often without
> thought of reciprocity - they do this by virtue of inheritance. The
> reciprocity is the quality that was selected.
> 
> -KO
> 
> 2008/12/27 <craigerb at comcast.net>
> 
> > [KO]
> >
> > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7797776.stm
> > Good news for those of us who see mutual cooperationas
> > evolutionary.However, the term 'reciprocal altruism' is oxymoronic
> > inEnglish.  'Altruism' is doing something for another's sakewithout
> expected
> > benefit to one's self.  A betterdescription is the one from the
> article
> > above, viz.,"calculated reciprocity".Craig