Kore by Andrzej Szczeklik

Author:Andrzej Szczeklik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2012-10-04T16:00:00+00:00

These unsolved enigmas include altruism. Within the animal world human societies represent a huge anomaly, because they are characterized by the division of labor and cooperation between large groups of people who are not related by blood. States, or international global organizations, are a distinct example of this, but even primitive societies provide similar examples, such as communities with a dense network of barter relationships, communal hunting and fighting and sharing out food. It would be hard to find this sort of behavior among animals, even among the primates that are closely related to us. The exceptions include some insect societies (such as bees, or ants) and one species of mole. The altruistic behavior of worker bees, which have lost the capacity to reproduce and dedicate their lives to the community of the hive, kept Darwin awake at night. In it he saw “a special difficulty, which at first appeared to me insuperable, and actually fatal to the whole theory.” Later he explained it as “family selection,” and even nowadays it is thought to be based on genetic kinship. Research into altruism related to kinship has had a rich development, producing sociobiology and even leading to attempts to encapsulate the enigma within a mathematical equation, called Hamilton’s equation (rB>C, where r is the coefficient of kinship, B is profit, and C is cost).

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