From: Smigrodzki, Rafal (SmigrodzkiR@msx.upmc.edu)
Date: Mon Jun 24 2002 - 14:54:31 MDT
Lee Corbin [mailto:lcorbin@tsoft.com]wrote:
would anyone ever be altruistic?). But they are wrong,
because people were on occasion altruistic hundreds of
thousands of years ago, and---according to one theory I
like---men with genuine altruism often got the woman,
because she was winning the arms race at that point in
time, and could choose the sincerely altruistic male and
discard the one who was only feigning altruism.
### Exactly. Sincere altruism does exist! It doesn't really matter that in
the beginning it was just another trick of the selfish gene. What matters is
that it is possible to fully identify (by a conscious choice based on
introspective analysis) with being an altruist - you incorporate it into
self, and from then on it is sincere, independent (to some extent) from
survival and other selfish considerations. As it happens, in the long run a
society consisting of altruistic units (with sufficient verification of the
individual level of altruism) should consistently outperform a society based
on pure reciprocating type of (pseudo)altruism, but this a separate issue.
Rafal
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