Altruism in human societies, where selfishness and altruism coexist, is difficult to explain in terms of natural selection, and group selection theory provides a solution. While individual selection favors selfish behavior, group selection favors altruistic groups that cooperate to survive. For example, altruistic groups can cooperate to care for the weak and thus maintain a larger surviving population. Humans reinforce altruism by slowing down individual selection through institutions, which allows selfishness and altruism to coexist.
The simple answer to the question “Are you selfish or altruistic?” is that everyone has a selfish side and an altruistic side. While this coexistence of selfishness and altruism seems natural to us, it is difficult to explain in evolutionary terms. According to natural selection, only individuals with the best traits for their environment survive, and altruistic behavior is less likely to survive than selfish behavior because it involves sacrificing one’s own interests. In the end, from an evolutionary perspective, only selfish individuals remain. However, altruism definitely exists in the real world, and scholars have proposed several hypotheses to explain it. The group selection hypothesis, which views the evolutionary process as group-centered rather than individual-centered, has important implications for explaining the altruism of humans as social animals. Let’s take a look at the group selection hypothesis.
Natural selection can be divided into individual selection and group selection. The aforementioned natural selection refers to individual-centered selection, which is called “individual selection”. According to individual selection, individuals with selfish traits have an advantage over altruistic individuals because they maximize their own interests. Therefore, over time, selfless individuals will disappear, and only selfish individuals will remain. But what if natural selection works on a population? Would a group of selfish people or a group of altruistic people be better suited to the environment? This view of natural selection is called “group selection”. Under group selection, altruistic behavior is “socially beneficial,” meaning that altruistic groups are better suited to the environment than selfish groups. For example, in the event of a war between groups, the altruistic group will have more brave and sacrificial warriors, and will therefore be more likely to prevail over the selfish group.
Now consider a situation where both individual and collective selection are at work. Selfishness will prevail from the perspective of individual selection, and altruism will prevail from the perspective of collective selection. Therefore, for altruism to survive, collective selection must act faster than individual selection. And the fact that altruism actually exists in our society means that group selection is working faster than individual selection, or at least at a similar rate.
To illustrate this, consider a tribal society that shares food. If selfish people and altruistic people coexist within a tribe, individual selection within the group will eventually lead to the selfish people being the only ones left. Selfless people share their food with others, while selfish people take food from others without sharing, resulting in the selfless people getting poorer and the selfish people getting richer. As a result, it becomes difficult for selfless people to survive, and only selfish people remain. In a tribe with only selfish people, it’s hard for individuals to survive if they can’t gather their own food.
However, if there is a tribe of altruistic people among many tribes, the situation is different. Altruistic tribes help each other and work together to ensure that the weak, the elderly, the orphaned, etc. have access to food. As a result, more people will survive than in a tribe of selfish people. So, in the aggregate, even though there may be many selfish tribes, one altruistic tribe can have a very large population and thus more altruistic people. In this context, when individual selection and collective selection occur simultaneously, altruism is likely to increase overall, and altruism can coexist with selfishness over time.
In this way, the group selection hypothesis provides an evolutionary explanation for the altruism we see around us. However, some critics argue that group selection is unlikely to keep up with the pace of individual selection in the real world. However, unlike other animals, humans have “institutions” that can slow down individual selection. In the previous example, in the absence of institutions, if an altruistic tribe is joined by a selfish person, the selfish person will have more food, which will accelerate individual selection. However, the altruistic tribe can stop the progression of individual selection toward more selfish people by instituting a system of communal ownership of resources. Humans are social animals that form communities in many forms, from large groups such as nations to small groups such as families, and use institutions to slow down individual selection and coordinate so that altruism is maintained. This allows human altruism to coexist with self-interest through collective selection.
