morality, charity according to evolution

Yes. And you might also point out the mathemetical difficulty in getting a gene for altruism to increase in frequency in a population when it starts out as a single mutation. That's even harder to accomplish, because until altruism is reciprocal, these is zero benefit for the trait carrier, and it can't be reciprocal until the trait reaches some critical frequency.

the point of procreation is to continue the species. the point of altruism is to ensure the survival of the group in order to procreate. therefore, the ultimate purpose of altruism is to continue the species. it doesn't matter if it is aimed at the species or just the group.

That doesn't strike me as difficult. It starts out as a signle mutation, yes; but the mutation is in someone's genitals, not their brain. In other words, the mutation is in several offspring before it has a chance to influence behavior. So, already, there are several related individuals with the gene who can reciprocate each other's altruism.

No, the point of procreation is the replication of the genes of the individual that procreates. I repeat, there is no evidence that ANY form of behavior in ANY animal has ever evolved "for the good of the species". It is very important that we all work toward extinguishing this antiquated notion. Species evolve or go extinct based on their ecological merits. Indivdual behavior can be selected only by virtue of the individual fitness benefits it confers. Where group selection comes in is that individual fitness can also be defined by group status, and thus the effect of the goup is to provide *individual* benefits for cooperation and altruism, that in turn let to enhanced group survival relative to other groups. In the end, it still comes down to individual fitness as defined by group dynamics.

i'm not talking about personal intentions. i'm talking about reality. if groups procreate, the species will continue. that's all i'm saying. this is called ultimate goals.

In your example you have set conditions for kin selection, not alrtuism, although it is often infered to be a precusor of actual altruism among unrelated individuals. But in population genetics models, it is extremely diffiuclt to model the increase in frequency of a gene for altruism when it is at low frequency because there is no payoff for the trait carrier.Check out this reference for a fairly good treatment of the topic.

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Trivers addressed the problem of altruism between unrelated individuals in a landmark paper (1971). He argued that such altruism is advantageous to its practitioner if directed only toward those individuals who will reciprocate; given the right cost-benefit ratios, over time, each member of a reciprocal relationship will do better than by acting alone.

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There are at least two difficulties with Trivers' formulation. First, the initial altruist in a population is a lone altruist; without reciprocity the individual is at a disadvantage so the trait will not spread (Wilson, 1975, pp. 120-121). This initial disadvantage applies equally to all altruistic behavior, regardless of species, and has been addressed as a population genetics problem by several authors (Wilson 1977, Boorman and Levitt 1980, Fagen 1980, Axelrod and Hamilton 1981), all of whom have relied on arguments that some form of drift, kin or group selection is necessary to establish the altruist gene in a population.

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Second, among humans it is by no means clear that the reciprocal exchanges to which Trivers refers are "altruistic" in any sense of the word (Sahlins 1976). Contrary to what is often assumed, much human reciprocal gift-giving is characterized not by altruism, as we commonly use the term, but by "prestations which are in theory voluntary, disinterested and spontaneous, but are in fact obligatory and interested.

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Both of these objections indicate that immediate self-interest plays a far larger part in reciprocal altruism than Trivers thought, and that any genetical theory of human reciprocal altruism or its component traits must account for this immediate self-interest.

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I realize you did not imply personal intentions, only an outcome.
But your statement can be easily misinterpreted to imply the wrong kind of group selection concept.
I am not disputing your projected end result, just your choice of terminology. For example, it is also not advisable to refer to 'ultimate goals'. The word 'goal' implies purpose, and evolutionary process has no purpose. We refer to this as telological reasoning and the ToE eshews teleology in all forms. That's one of the reasons it is so unnerving to those convinced that god has a plan for everything.

And let us not forget that selection is somewhat of a stochastic process -- if the fitness difference is not too great, then the altruism allele(s) may propagate for several generations and reach the critical number of individuals purely by chance.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

How could altruism develop over time if it undermines the very principles that epitomize the evolutionary theory? How could a trait for altruism be transmitted from generation to generation? If an animal that exhibited some level of altruism, then they'd more prone to be preyed upon. If they are preyed more highly than the others, then fewer altruists would survive to reproduce. Eventually, altruism should vanish from any given population strictly by examining the classical, evolutionary model. In other words, the nice guy always finishes last in a dog-eat-dog world. We know that certain creatures can work together. And that's fine. One, it makes perfect sense on how it would help them survive, because there is safety in numbers. And two, we're able to witness this event when we see birds flying together. But nursing the sick back to health doesn't conform.So its up to certain pro-evolutionists to redefine what biological fitness means in order to resolve the marked paradox. Darwinian thought concerning fitness culminates the ability of an individual to survive and reproduce, and thus yielding offspring to carry on some of their traits. The focus has now shifted from how individual fitness can evolve into inclusive fitness, crossing over to the overall populace. But this ignores the plain fact about the ToE. Kin selection can't be quantified. But it tries to reason with an over-elaborate scheme that ultimately undermines everything we've been taught on how a species is to survive. They survive by being cut-throat.As I pointed out elsewhere, merciless killing, lying, cheating, stealing elucidates ToE, not altruism. As it relates to humans, taking care of sick people fits nowhere in the Darwinian model. Doing 'good' for no immediate gain fits nowhere at all. ToE is dependant on we might otherwise call, sinful. I realize that you might object to the term, 'sinful,' but you understand the premise I hope, even if you don't ascribe to any set of theistic beliefs.

That's bogus. You can precisely quantify kin selection based on how many of your genes you statistically share with the kin in question. For instance, worker bees sacrifice their lives to protect the hive because the queen is an exact clone of every worker bee, so there's not a genetic difference between the offspring of a worker bee (which are sterile, actually) and the offspring the queen produces on her behalf.Any worker sacrificing herself for the queen is a 1 to 1 equivalence, because the queen shares all her genes. There's no reduction in fitness for that behavior. Could you cite a source for where those are defined and mandated within modern evolutionary theory?

Although I agree with you that Kin Selection can easily be quantified once degree of relatedness is known, you have horribly mangled your example.The queen and her workers are only 50% related to one another - it is the workers that are 75% related to each other, by virtue of all having the same father who only has a single copy of all his genes (assuming the queen mates only once, which is not always true).Because of arrhenotokous reproduction in the Hymenoptera, workers arise from fertilized eggs made sterile only by the diet they are fed. Feed them royal jelly as larvae and any one can become a new queen. It is the Drones that arise from unfertilized eggs and have only one copy of all the chromosomes. This is the haplo-diploid system of arrhenotoky .I don't want it to seem like I'm following you around (or slapping you around with my dick, I think you said ), but you need to be more careful.

Server playing tricks on me....This message has been edited by EZscience, 05-11-2006 02:42 PM

i agree with crashfrog, NJ, where can you find it in evolutionary literature that altruism does not fit in.Your dog eat dog is a business world, not in the reproductive world.Quite frankly, natural selection doesn't care how successful a business man you are (unless that fact alone makes you more attractive as a mate)

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How could altruism develop over time if it undermines the very principles that epitomize the evolutionary theory? How could a trait for altruism be transmitted from generation to generation? If an animal that exhibited some level of altruism, then they'd more prone to be preyed upon. If they are preyed more highly than the others, then fewer altruists would survive to reproduce.

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Not so; if those that benefited from the act of altruism share the gene or genes for altruism, then those genes would end up being more likely to survive into the next generation. The existence and maintenance of altruism fit very well into the evolution paradigm.Added by edit:Oh, in case you've missed it, I did respond to your last message in the Evolution Simplified thread. No problems if you've lost interest in it; the topic seems to have drifted into other lines now.This message has been edited by Chiroptera, 11-May-2006 09:34 PM

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

You're right, of course. I think my mistake was forgetting that the queen is the mother of the workers, not their sister, even though queens are promoted workers. That queen would, of course, be the queen of a new colony.Dumb mistake.