As a student very much interested in the sciences, I came across this idea of the “selfish gene.” It involves the idea of individuals only being altruistic towards people with similar genes. For example, a mother is more likely to sacrifice her life for her child than for a complete stranger. According to the theory, individuals consider themselves first and then their children, followed by other members of their family, their race, and their species. Many people believe that this is the genetic explanation for racism.
What do you think? Do people only help their own and is DNA the reason? Is NYC an anomaly or could this be the reason why neighborhoods are concentrated by specific ethnicities? Does this mean that people are born racist?
The passage below is an excerpt from the book, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.
Recently there has been a reaction against racialism and patriotism, and a tendency to substitute the whole human species as the object of our fellow feeling. This humanist broadening of the target of our altruism has an interesting corollary, which again seems to buttress the ‘good of the species’ idea in evolution. The politically liberal, who are normally the most convinced spokesmen of the species ethic, now often have the greatest scorn for those who have gone a little further in widening their altruism, so that it includes other species. If I say that I am more interested in preventing the slaughter of large whales than I am in improving housing conditions for people, I am likely to shock some of my friends.
The feeling that members of one’s own species deserve special moral consideration as compared with members of other species is old and deep. Killing people outside war is the most seriously regarded crime ordinarily committed. The only thing more strongly forbidden by our culture is eating people (even if they are already dead). We enjoy eating members of other species, however. Many of us shrink from judicial execution of even the most horrible human criminals, while we cheerfully countenance the shooting without trial of fairly mild animal pests. Indeed we kill members of other harmless species as a means of recreation and amusement. A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet the chimp feels and thinks and — according to recent experimental evidence — may even be capable of learning a form of human language. The foetus belongs to our own species, and is instantly accorded special privileges and rights because of it. Whether the ethic of ‘speciesism’, to use Richard Ryder’s term, can be put on a logical footing any more sound than that of ‘racism’, I do not know. What I do know is that it has no proper basis in evolutionary biology.
The muddle in human ethics over the level at which altruism is desirable — family, nation, race, species, or all living tilings — is mirrored by a parallel muddle in biology over the level at which altruism is to be expected according to the theory of evolution. Even the group-selectionist {17} would not be surprised to find members of rival groups being nasty to each other: in this way, like trade unionists or soldiers, they are favouring their own group in the struggle for limited resources. But then it is worth asking how the group-selectionist decides which level is the important one. If selection goes on between groups within a species, and between species, why should it not also go on between larger groupings? Species are grouped together into genera, genera into orders, and orders into classes. Lions and antelopes are both members of the class Mammalia, as are we. Should we then not expect lions to refrain from killing antelopes, ‘for the good of the mammals’? Surely they should hunt birds or reptiles instead, in order to prevent the extinction of the class. But then, what of the need to perpetuate the whole phylum of vertebrates?
It is all very well for me to argue by reductio ad absurdum, and to point to the difficulties of the group-selection theory, but the apparent existence of individual altruism still has to be explained. Ardrey goes so far as to say that group selection is the only possible explanation for behaviour such as ‘stotting’ in Thomson’s gazelles. This vigorous and conspicuous leaping in front of a predator is analogous to bird alarm calls, in that it seems to warn companions of danger while apparently calling the predator’s attention to the stotter himself. We have a responsibility to explain stotting Tommies and all similar phenomena, and this is something I am going to face in later chapters.
Before that I must argue for my belief that the best way to look at evolution is in terms of selection occurring at the lowest level of all. In this belief I am heavily influenced by G. C. Williams’s great book Adaptation and Natural Selection. The central idea I shall make use of was foreshadowed by A. Weismann in pre-gene days at the turn of the century — his doctrine of the ‘continuity of the germ-plasm’. I shall argue that the fundamental unit of selection, and therefore of self-interest, is not the species, nor the group, nor even, strictly, the individual. It is the gene, the unit of heredity.
I think it’s focusing on a very biological point of view, which isn’t wrong at all. In developmental psychology, there are rifts between scientists and researchers over what is the major influence in developing a person’s identity. The two major contenders in this case are that of heredity biology, and that of environmental factors.
In my family, there is a particularly interesting mesh of mixes, which may support the idea of environmental factors. My grandmother on my father’s side grew up not knowing her biological mother, and was raised in an African American family. She grew up with the family’s only daughter, and they both grew up together, sharing many experiences together. Then my grandmother married an Italian and had my father and his 3 siblings. One of them, my late uncle, grew up and married an African American woman, and had a child, my cousin.
Looking at that scenario, the concept of a ‘heredity gene’ causing altruism doesn’t seem likely. More-so, the environmental factor of spending time with someone that isn’t in your race, and having that transcend down to your children seems to also be a significant factor (not necessarily the only factor)
While it makes sense that people would be more altruistic to those who are more closely related to them than to tho
While it makes sense that people would be more altruistic to those who are more closely related to them than to those who are more distantly, in my anthropology class, something that was really emphasized was that the idea of race is a social, not biological construct, and that people who are of the same race or ethnicity are often more closely related to people of other races or ethnicities than they are to each other. However, if people believe that other people of the same race of ethnicity are more closely related to them even when they’re not, I can see how it would influence them to be more altruistic to them than to people from other groups.