Tuesday, January 31, 2012
The evolution of altruism by individual selection
Jerry Coyne reviews Michael Price's review of A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution, by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. Basically (and I can't do justice to Coyne's comments), the evidence suggests that "altruism" as we actually see it looks like a standard evolutionary "arms race" between cooperators and would-be "free riders", which is explainable by individual selection.
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