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Episode 118: Hamilton's Rule, Altruism, Kin selection
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log talk radio this is to beat your genes podcast and my name is Nate Chi I created this podcast to bridge together the science of evolutionary psychology and the clinical experience of dr. Doug Lyall all so that we can discover what life is all about in each episode dr. Weil analyzes and explains the psychology behind real life situations from our listeners on topics like romance friendship work family health and many more we broadcast live every Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time which means you can call us during the show and ask dr. Lyle a question the us number is six five seven three eight three zero seven five one or send in your question to the website WWV your genes org all right good evening everybody its Meiji here along with dr. Doug Lyall with the beat genes podcast dr. Lyle how you doing today good about yourself good to hear your voice doing pretty good I was just reading some of the questions and because our show today is about Hamilton's law which is a more theory on evolutionary psychology and altruism and basically why we do anything and so it reminded me of the first time I heard you speak and I've talked about this in previous shows where the first time I heard you talk was a question about what is love and you went through a beautiful explanation in terms of you know and you explained it mathematically about how the eggs are so much bigger than the sperm and so it's just biologically more valuable and how its scarce and then the next day when you came someone asked you what why do people do anything and you launched into this incredible lecture about Hamilton's law which you kind of circled all the way around and didn't even mention Hamilton until the very end which is a very very classic dr. Lisle lecture but it was fascinating because growing up every time you know I tried to sound scientific with my friends we would always say oh survival of the fittest survival of the fittest survival of a list and you went over how that's not actually the point of life is not survivable fittest and the example I remember you giving was that if it were true that it was survival of the fittest then researchers would never observe a female lion defend her cub against a male's lion attack because she would obviously like more fitter and she would never do that and then the other argument was about survival of the species mmm in which case the male line would never attack the cub if it was survival of the species at which point you made the incredible case that it's actually neither of those two it's survival of the gene and which kid that turns into Hamilton's law in terms of how do we know what gets favored more than the other and so today shows about that act Hamilton's law and so I want to talk to you a little bit more about that and the implications of altruism and kin selection because of it but before we kind of get to that I had a question from one of the listeners and then we can get to first and the question is dr. Lyle if you had unlimited funds what causes or organizations would you donate to of course in this hypothetical context your donations would be anonymous and so it pence would not be status seeking and you wanted to maximize the leverage of the positive impact on future generations yeah that's a great question obviously unlimited tons would make me czar it would make me that I had controlled off the resources in the world alright so I know what the person is speaking to if I had a huge amount of funds at my discretion and essentially remember that you don't you don't make things happen you redirect energies so so the question is what would be a smart way for us to redirect energies that that would be the most valuable projects so I don't know enough about organizations to know what's a good organization so I'm not going to would wouldn't comment on that but in principle this is an in-principle question and the in principle question is what kinds of ideas or projects are the most important in my view in other words do I think that we're very close to quote curing cancer and that we should throw you know a trillion dollars at that man will have that done it'll improve human life X amount if that were true or should should there be other ideas about you know save the save the whales or save the environment etc etc what what sorts of things would be the most worthwhile in terms of my personal view I don't have a great deal of confidence and inhumans ability to sort of pick an individual direction and to try to figure out where resources should be directed I think that I think they can do so and they can do so with some some degree of effectiveness but and that's fine and I think that's I think the efforts that are being made by many people are very positive in this way I'm sure that if I were to look at what the Bill Gates Foundation is up to I probably think that they're probably doing a lot of good I would assume the however if I had if I could change something about this earth and its and its functioning within the realm of theoretical possibility it would be that human beings the world over would more quickly hasten to understand the value of free societies free enterprise minimal government intervention etc so that that is the single I think if there's a frustration for for some of us that that have a a good understanding of this it's that human capability has actually now achieved really what it needs to achieve in terms of its understanding of how to manage resources in the environment literally how to rearrange atoms in the service of human needs we literally know enough right now for everybody to be in the world to be living at the level of the very comfortable upper middle class in the United States so now in order to get that all implemented it might take I mean if you had political solutions to where it is that all governments understood that the the best interests of humanity and everybody under those banners was a libertarian free enterprise situation then that would probably be achieved in maybe 30 40 years but that's how fast the world would probably move to get that accomplished it's not hard to build a refrigerator once somebody's already figured out how to build it and it's not difficult to build a very very good electric car after they've already figured out how to do it just copying it is not hard and so the the extraordinarily difficult problem of actually making life really good and reasonable and physically easy and pleasant and orderly and safe that has been achieved it's been achieved in Western democracies I live in such a set of circumstances as do the vast majority of our listeners and and so this is very doable and there's nothing magical about the United States or the resources here that have this happen this was a political process that allowed human beings to use their intelligence and in an incentive structure built into a market economy in order to accomplish this so this would mean so the most important thing that in principle we could do that would save the probably probably the best theoretical net unitive of return on investment would be if there could be methods to hasten human understanding and human political situations so that you could actually have a world where you did not have the kind of the kind of governmental problems as you have now now it's not terrible so right now it's very clear that the good guys are winning that the systems that are more conducive to freedom are vastly more effective than the systems that are not and so those systems are vastly outproducing and are going to be superior far superior militarily so they're going to be safe reasonably safe and they're going to be very superior in terms of how it is that people live and they are inherently going to be stable because they're not you know it's not going to be easily overthrown etc so it's pretty darn good so we've were extremely lucky if you if you live in one of these Western democracies you may not appreciate fully just how lucky you are if you live in a situation that isn't like that you know how bizarre this is the concept of people being able to open an Apple stand and sell apples or do anything that they want to do and trade with anybody that they want to trade that's that's inconceivable under under sort of dictator type governments now the the amount of the amount of human waste and suffering that's the result of the interventionist situations is pretty vast the world that I envision is a world without the standard you know demo-publican interventionist politics state-sponsored so-called science and medicine and education you know crippling guild systems for employment to give money and security to those got government protection and exclude others etc my my vision is one of a BorderFree worldwide market economy where we're land you know labor capital ideas etc all are just compete in a worldwide marketplace to try to figure out who's got the best solutions and who's doing the best for the consumers and therefore who's doing it cheaper better faster etc that material advance certainly has to be you have to have ground rules for all these things you have to have civil and criminal legal systems you have to have protection for the environment you got to have a lot of things it's complicated it's health but in principle the biggest single hurdle for humans is understanding the extraordinary value of freedom in this regard and not cherishing it and not understanding it and so the that that is the single largest conceptual mistake that human beings are making and it is costing untold amount of suffering and death in the world the when you see a bunch of little kids in India starving you are no not looking at a lack of government compassion you're not looking at lack of intervention you're not looking at anything other than a society where people do where history has not blessed them with a series of events that have made possible the freedoms that we have in the United States okay they it's a pot they're so corrupt there that you you just can't get anything done in a in a market process to save your life this means that the little people suffer tremendously and that that you know that's going on all over the world and it goes on here okay when you when I I knew a I met a young lady very very smart girl 4.0 student Asian girl carved her way out of Thailand to come to the United States and she'd been here several years sitting on a perfect record and could not get into nursing school and the reason she couldn't get in a nursing school is she couldn't pass what was actually a very crafty and tricky English test now I could understand her perfectly and she could understand me perfectly all the way to sophisticated sense of humor but when I looked at the test he would have things like you had to know the difference between sale si IL and sale si le and let me tell you if you start splitting hairs on subtleties like that this is a this is a credentialing process that is keeping somebody out that that we would be better off having in as opposed to somebody not nearly as smart who knows the difference between those two words so what is this this is just a government guild system you know that is essentially not allowing a free market process for excellence to succeed and for less competent people to have to do things that are less complicated so this is this is the biggest thing that stands between humans and and their ability to have future generations have a better resistance it will happen anyway I am exceedingly confident we'll never be able to see this so I can I can say it boldly like I know what I'm talking about but I'm looking at the march of history over the last 200 years and when I see the next 200 years I see an inevitable march towards greater and greater freedom you're not going to be able to stop digital communication to reach every corner of the world and people are going to find out how other people in the world are actually living and they're going to find out that we're not joking we have it unbelievably good and so could you and we're no smarter than you are you've just got bad corrupt nasty oppressive governments and as people would understand this and people within the United States would quit trying to work against it and instead we repeal back the this interventionist ridiculous expensive destructive activity that we do we would find that we would have you know paradise is on as far as paradise is going to happen anyway but it would happen much more quickly and so that's that's where I would put my money time and effort if I had the resources so a couple of comments on the Facebook group came up as a result of last week's show on this little topic and yeah some of these thoughts as well in the question is is a lot of the innovation nowadays well not a lot of it but some of the innovation has to do with pleasure trap things so the sex robots pleasurable food all these things here though as markets are allowed to essentially exploit our biological drives and the flaws vulnerabilities from that how do we how do you know how do we protect ourselves from that or is it simply just you know the people who are X Y or Z personality traits able to get out of it will and the people who don't have those traits won't won't ever get out of it yeah there's there's a this is the the price of freedom is that that you're going to have traps like this that are going to be available and we can't I'm Iowa's shudder I have heard I don't know how many times in the hyper health arena that we should ban sugar we should ban me either we should ban this or ban mats like I can't I can't it's hard to believe that people think this way the you don't ban anything people people have choices and when there are negative consequences of those choices you have a free market and information hopefully you don't have a government dictating policy and an FDA deciding this out of the other and you don't have government pamphlets telling people what's true and what isn't true and you don't have government teachers telling students that are in a compulsory school system what it is if they're supposed to think and get right on the test you have a free market of information where you know you have Khan Academy making a mockery of the universities of the world okay for free so the truth of the matter is if we get in principle you strip away people's reliance on government to tell them what to think and what's true instead they have to be more sensitive to essentially free market processes and they have to learn and they have to listen and they have to find out the way they do about everything else into the Sun which is use their brains imitate other people and listen and use their intelligence and etc and so you you trust the fact that people are the best deciders for what it is that they ought to be doing whether or not that self-destructive or not it's not like they're not going to find out so it wasn't the government that helped people figure out that they met maybe ought to be less animal food dairy products etc that it wasn't the government it was a a not very well-funded band of people that were interested in getting that message out to the public on that they knew okay so that's that's how that goes so in the same way I'm not I'm not interested in and us dictating to anybody what their choices would be you let you let people go where their interest go and they find out for themselves how it is to manage any problems that come along the way fantastic and my parents came from socialists or you know communist Russia and so the argument always we can either starve on socialism will be overfed under capitalism I think we would all have to refer freedom of every said I've never heard that before that's a that's a fantastic encapsulation of exactly what we're talking about beautiful alright so yeah thank you for that answer that's uh that we've had that question the queue for a little bit and I'm glad we could put it in for this topic so let's move along to the the ultra ism kin selection Hamilton's law and this also I guess has to do with this ingrained you've talked about in previous shows about an ingrained morality compass and so tell us I notice it's kind of a long question but but tell us all tell us a bit about those ok first of all just a tiny little point of order we don't call it Hamilton's law we call it Hamilton's rule nope just a slight slightly different so no we're good the Hamilton's rule is the it's got a formal mathematical no inequality but what it is that it's the notion that that's also called inclusive fitness which is the notion that that an animal's success in life is not just how many children it has but also whether or not it's its other relatives will also be successful and so we you can see that an animal isn't just in it for themselves we can quickly see that they're out to that success in biological terms is essentially how many offspring did you leave on the planet and so we can see clearly that biology is a competitive process of alternative individuals essentially it altom utley becomes one of individual genes but certain genes are more numerous than others because they are more successful at surviving and reproducing now one of the characteristics of genes that are successful in certain species is genes that actually can and set by some mechanism statistically or definitely recognize when their genes are located in another body so a mother that gives birth and then there's you know three little hamsters running around the one the mother that knows that those three are hers but there's three other hamsters that are not hers the one that knows which are which and can recognize those individuals and has a way to detect those and then directs her resources towards those individuals that's a hamster that's more successful than one that can't do that very well and so this is the transfer of energy from that mother to offspring to increase offsprings likely to success that is a you could call that in principle self-sacrificial because as she does that she reduces her own chances of survival she could be hiding in the ground she could just be eating for herself not venturing forth and getting exposed to predators but instead she takes these risks and gets these resources to give them to her offspring that characteristic was built by genes that are more successful than genes that would just say well here we are sitting in a body let's defend it as long as we can okay so this is how we this is how we can start to see how the genes work the genes are able to to grasp I say that in quotes because the genes don't grasp anything they're just a tommy-toms that the code for proteins that build neural circuits that do the grasping but we can we can think of them if we want just for fun as if they're little conscious entities or calculating entities so the genes are are essentially building organisms that that make decisions that that optimize the survival of those genes wherever those genes are located now it was Hamilton's insight that it doesn't stop at offspring it also goes sideways in the gene pool to what we might call second-degree relatives so this is going to be for example your your nephew or niece so now we have to start realizing that the impacted behavior is not just about the the individuals survival or their direct reproduction it's literally the sum total demising that animals behavior with respect to optimizing its its genetic success so therefore it might feed its nephew more than its own child if that same chunk of food would be for example that the nephew is twenty five percent of that individuals genes the child is 50 percent of the genes so if it could with the same unit of food more than double the impact on the survival of the nephew relative to its child then it should feed the nephew rather than its child with that chunk of food this is what Hamilton's rule is about or is attempting to describe that this kind of mathematics would have been shaped into animals where actually it could be I would necessarily be the case just because it would be possible would mean that evolution would would find a solution but it could and it's clear that evolution is is clearly made animal brains to be very helpful to their own offspring and in fact we found conditions where animal brains are helpful to secondary relatives as well like nieces and nephews the so now so now what we're going to do is we're going to use this try to understand kind of human action in what we call morality so I think we're going to we would begin this discussion with a notion of what morality is and so we're going to contrast it with what we would call a moral so a moral actions or actions that we would we would look at those and say basically the individual did not consider the other party at all they just got they just took what they wanted that that would be a moral I guess we call it immoral but nature is a mall so natural basically we don't expect animals to be considering the impact on others we consider the cheetah to run down the Thomson's gazelle that's fat we consider the leopard to intimidate the cheetah out of that Thomson's gazelle when it's half eat because it's in its best interest and it couldn't really care less about the interests of others so throughout the animal kingdom mostly mostly what we see is a moral action now the we see highly considered action in these tight Hamiltonian circles like mother child offspring considerations but in otherwise what we see is essentially quote survival of the fittest too bad not really interested in the rules and in human action we might consider sort of moral the issue that you've got humans living in groups where the impact of what it is that you do could have a significant negative impact on somebody else other words you've got conflicts of interest with others and so you have to be able to compute or manage the conflict of interest against you know your short-term seemingly best interest versus what the sum total of those interests are the impact they have on other people and then how this then essentially reduces the the cooperativeness of group action and the cohesiveness of that group yeah and therefore reduces potentially the protection and benefits that you would get as a group living animal so if it turned out that that we didn't have for example if somebody turned their back and you ran and stole their food and just ran off and ate it then the issue would be is that quote the right way to to live and we we know as as people that that's not a good way to live because now you the expense of actually having to guard you for your food against thieving freeloading flakes winds up being really high and the value of being around those people is they're comparatively less and therefore we may not have a cohesive system we may not be able to live that way so it's going to turn out that human beings evolved quote morality which might be translated into consider to consider others so the which means that your computing your thinking feeling and considering others where there's conflicts between what appears to be your short-term best interest versus what is actually a your long-term best interests all things being computed now nobody knows where this started it certainly had another child need asymmetry was undoubtedly involved in the evolution of Moral Sentiments in other words mothers undoubtedly are sensitive and worried about and concerned about the chirping of their own kid as opposed to the chirping of the kid next door and so that's a natural sensitivity and sympathy that that would be developed towards being very worried about the pain of others you can see however we could step outside of this and we wouldn't have to be walking down the road of straight Hamilton's rule ie well actually we wouldn't have to be thinking about about kinship we could step outside of kinship and we would still find some roots of an interesting process that was probably associated with the evolution of morality in humans and that would be grooming behavior that you'll see in primates and you'll see there in other animals as well so I want you to think about a couple of birds who have some you know live in a jungle and there's some worm that drops down from the trees and it sometimes drops right down into a place and it's back where it can start to eat away at the bird's skin and cause infections and then reduce the likely to the birds ability to survive now the bird can't reach that worm itself but if it's got a quote friend that will Peck that that worm and you know what you can just see how this could happen see how behaviors like this could have easily evolved because a bird might peck a worm anyway that's on the ground right so now if it turns out that you have a characteristic that you fly up close to your friend and you turn your back and pull up your feathers and so your friend can see that there's a worm there and he pecks it now we've got a situation where we've we've been able to potentially evolve a behavior pattern takes advantage of some existing behavior patterns but now we wind up with grooming behavior and so grooming behavior you can see how we could get a situation where one animal might do some grooming on another animal and there might not be a worm there to eat eventually what you might have is just one animal that's digging some nasty tick out of another animal's back and it's not eating the tick it's just digging and out of there and it's helping the first animal and the reason they're going to do this is not that it's Hamiltonian because maybe they're they're not very closely related so there's no hamiltonian fraction there that's helping this that what in fact is happening is that there's a tendency for them to reciprocate so this is going to be what triggers called delayed reciprocal altruism and so this is also how you then get you can get mutual grooming behavior where both animals are better off okay so now you start to see how you could get for example sympathy circuits that an animal that is that feels sympathetic and helpful towards another animal and goes to some trouble to actually invest some energy and digging ticks off the other animals back winds up then getting that same thing reciprocated to them and you can see how this would be an interesting mathematical and practical and engineering problem in evolution that you're going to get some people that are going to be one of wanting to cheat so you're going to get people that or excuse me not animals that are what would that put show they're back to another animal to have it pick the ticks out but then they don't turn around and pick the ticks out of the other guys back so you're going to also then get grudge packing where you're going to get animals that if you do that to them then they don't ever groom you again okay so you can start to see the evolution of behavior whether or not there's emotional sentiments that are marking it is irrelevant so there might be people that would say well Doug how do you you know you you really think that that there would be sort of grudge packing irritation etc and a baboon I don't know okay I really couldn't tell you it wouldn't shock me if there were feelings of irritation about being shortchanged in in baboon society where somebody that was a lousy reciprocate er would be more would be less likely to wind up getting roomed okay so I can see that as a possibility that they could actually have an evolution of such calculus and feelings and therefore resultant behavior but we certainly know that it's true in humans so humans meticulously keep track of how well other people help them they have feelings towards those individuals and now we're going to get to sort of one of the all-time discussions it always comes up when we start putting all tourism and under under the microscope and we start explaining it and that is that a lot of people get upset when you start to explain that all tourism is motivated like everything else and that there's a cost-benefit analysis that guided the evolution of all tourism and guides the calculations of individuals that are doing altruistic acts and so people will swear up and down no I never want anything in return you know I've done these wonderful things and I never expected anything back ok and to which I cry foul and I will say yes you did ok and so what you can you can see the evolution of this process as it would look as follows so let's suppose that you come across someone who is quietly crying and what will happen is you will feel helpful and the reason they are even making those noises of distress is because evolution is shaped them to make those noises because those noises may actually succeed in bringing in an alterus that is going to spend some time and energy to make that individuals life better and so as a result what's going to happen is somebody may feel very sympathetic so let's suppose it's you and so you feel helpful and you feel sympathetic you're motivated to try to figure out what's wrong and as you and you go degrees in those feelings in those motivations are actually being computed through a you know a host of sophisticated algorithms that have been shaped by evolution so for example uh what let's let's just let's just put it this way it's a pretty girl crying in the corner and a man walks by and sees that she's seems to be very frustrated at her desk and she's you know she just looks like she's all upset now you seem more likely to stop and be helpful for the pretty girl where is he more likely to stop and help for a grandma who you isn't you is making the same the same same sniffles a 68 year old grandma little gray-haired overweight etc okay which is he more likely to stop and help I think we know okay all things being equal he's going to stop and help pretty girl of course this doesn't this shouldn't surprise us any if anybody you know wants to debate that we can look at the scientific evidence on that we already know what the answer is now sometimes people will help people that are very downtrodden and appear to have no assets to reciprocate but they do they've got a mouth okay and so if if we help them and they appeared to have no ability to reciprocate then that reputation that they helped me and yet there was nothing I could have done to reciprocate because I was in such bad shape will permeate the village and our individual that did the helping will get extra kudos for having been someone that would have helped without any obvious possibility of having reciprocation okay so and you say well what good is that well it's worth a lot of good because the more the more you are known for having done something that you weren't looking for anything in return the more valuable of an insurance policy you are so this is the the apex of this as a sophisticated deep strategy would have to be the Mitzvah in in Jewish religion so the notion is is that you're going to do something you should do it because it's quote the right thing to do and you're do it without any hope of everybody knowing and you do it quietly and anonymously well let me tell you something this is actually extraordinarily sophisticated way to try to look at this problem only possible people with a lot of smarts and a lot of delay of gratification the notion is hopefully get caught doing a mitzvah so you would if you can set it up in such a way that it really looked like there was no you know there was no way that you were angling to get this thing found out you did all anonymously then then what a beautiful thing to have been discovered okay so this is of course how you know people would operate they would operate on on just this sophisticated and up level depending upon the sophisticated of their particular neural circuitry notice that when you help you feel good the only reason why you would feel good is that if your statistical likelihood of gene survival rose that's what good feelings are so you would feel good because there's a statistical increased likelihood of your dream survival so that feeling of being magnanimous that you helped you know etc and that even looked to the other folks like you did it for quote no obvious gain we're good okay the better they think that the more cachet I've got etc now watch carefully the recipient of this let's suppose that you just helped somebody and went to a bunch of trouble and they they said thank you so much et cetera et cetera they feel grateful that's part of the evolution of their moral sentiments so that that feeling and communication of that feeling is essential because it's essentially a system of accounting where human being signal each other that IOU so that's what thank-you means in human stone-age language okay thank you means IOU and so we can see the degrees of the acknowledgment of that debt when someone says hey can tell me that hey thinks that means I don't really owe you thank you means I owed you and thank you so much I just can't tell you how much I appreciate that that tells you that I owe you and therefore if I'm in a position to reciprocate appropriately at some later time I will okay so you feel good receiving that because you have now have evidence that you've increased your likelihood of gene survival you have stone-age money in the bank now so you feel appreciated you feel good notice how irritated you are if you were to go to a bunch of trouble to help somebody and they did not say thank you that is proof positive that human moral structure was designed by nature along to say delayed reciprocal altruism processes if they do not say thank you when you have helped them then you are angry anger is again a moral sentiment it is basically signaling the end of their individual that they are treating you unfairly okay and the purpose of anger is to activate it's it's mirror image which is guilt so guilt is the moral mechanism to tell you that you have done something that is is potentially going to reduce your likelihood of gene survival and it water be unless you hustle and get rid of this guilt it's an unpleasant feeling anger is basically you better do something and make sure that you collect on a debt because you've been treated unfairly so that's an unpleasant feeling so these unpleasant feelings are signaling devices that are actually part of an adjudication of fairness in an animal that has conflicts of interest between them living in a cohesive group process so these this is the Moral Sentiments this is how this works and it's all it's all orchestrated it can get more complicated sometimes people will do spectacular things that they could never be never be what do you call it there could never be any direct reciprocation for that but what there could be is it could be an increased statistical likelihood of mating because it's indicating great genes that you could afford to do some fantastic thing for other people so there's there's other considerations here and it can get fairly complicated mapping out the little arrows associated with human experience altruistic behavior and the Moral Sentiments but it's all there it's all wired in it's all part of human nature and it is certainly not anything that needs to be taught so we don't need church we don't need school we don't need teachers and you don't even need parents for this these are spontaneous activation of innate neural circuits that that are that help an animal to orchestrate the conflicts of interest and the benefits of mutual interest in cooperation of a group living animal so that's the nature of human morality and its roots and it's in its basic functions well fantastic it reminds me of one else it kind of filled in a little little gap I remember when I was in grade school at my parents had me you know we are I think we're visiting temple or something like that I've encrypt Jewish and I like you said the highest level in Jewish Jewish tradition of altruism is where you donate a lot of a lot of something and you don't expect anything in return it's all it's actually anonymous and I remember one adult you know they had their checkbook out and supposed to be all anonymous and then they dropped the checkbook with the with the carbon copy of the check on the floor and I'm sure you know yeah as a kid I couldn't tell if it was on purpose or not but you know who knows those are purpose but it could have just been you know accidental quote right right exactly fair enough yeah and and so a lot of these displays are simply do you believe that they are consciously done because once in a while I hear people who they want to brag about how much they plan these things out but when I see people's actions they seem to be congruent with them just happening automatically what can we infer about well who like to talk sir yeah sorry to interrupt cute God knows I'm too all talking you plenty more if you want oh yeah yes there is there's both going on so we are often conscious you aren't consciously directing anything your brain is what arrives and consciousness is is the result of thinking that's going on unconsciously and so you are aware of some of those unconscious processes as they arrive in consciousness and you are you actually are consciously aware of some of the conniving that's going on you are also not aware of some of the conniving that's going on so some times are are very clear about they are playing a chess game with other people psychologists and they know if I do this he's going to think that and then he's going to do this and I'm going to do that and I do that he's going to do this and when he does that I'm going to do that and then he's going to think wow what a cool guy look what he did okay so we can think those things through like a chess game and that doesn't mean we're bad people it means there's our brains have computed that it's the cost benefit is worth actually going to the energy to try to game it out to try to increase our odds of the result that we want so if you're going to try to get Joseph Stalin to not you know start World War three or if you're trying to figure out how to stop you know any nut to do anything from suing you you try to game it out and you try to figure out how does it guy pull the levers in their nervous system and so that's there's nothing in the world wrong with that kind of directed Machiavellian you know plotting it makes complete sense that we would we would have that capability and we we do have it anybody that tries to get their mom to give them a you know let them stay home from school you know I mean is doing this now the however a great deal of actions in this regard and a great deal of just naturally helpful empathic quote altruistic action it's just being it's just all done automatically and let me point out there's nothing in the world about this that is negative the fact that a human being has the reason why we have arrived that this is a characteristic is because one unit of my effort might save the other person a hundred units of life or more so a day of my effort might save them thirty years of life because I spent a day saving their their their hide okay so the fact that they owe me and that they are willing to pay me back you know fifty to one on that that over the course of our their lifetime there's nothing in the world wrong with that we have both benefited from my short-term altruistic behavior that took me one day out of my way on my other issues and therefore saved that person thirty years okay so to say that the only way that this would be good is if I would do it without expecting anything in return is fanciful and absurd and ridiculous and you can't evolve it it can't be a characteristic of a species okay it can't be characteristic of a species if it doesn't if it doesn't fall in line with a clue Civ fitness if it my spending that energy of one day of effort does not come back as one day of more survival or reproduction for my genes on earth then that behavior gets penalized by evolution and gets selected out by the Grim Reaper so the fact that it's profitable doesn't mean we have to be Machiavellian and shitty and consciously calculating and devious or anything else under the Sun it means we can be what we are which is a pretty darn pleasant species okay if you set up circumstances with good rules with firm boundaries in a solid alpha etc like you have in Western democracies then you can have a very very pleasant life experience and you can get quite a bit of altruistic behavior that's going to be very helpful okay and everybody's better off behind it so the so hopefully I mean obviously this is one of these almost sophomoric discussions except that that people do get get twisted up about the fact that they have altruistic pleasant or helpful feelings and they feel like possibly the glare of evolutionary psychology basically says no that's just a bunch of selfish gene motivated crap no it's not it's not at all okay this is the fact that the genes have built systems for you to have those feelings and to take those actions under certain conditions is completely reasonable that's a wonderful thing the fact that it doesn't have you take those actions under all conditions just proves to you how sophisticated it is hey if Charles Manson were in my prison and he fell down and was having a cardiac arrest and I had just been trained to give CPR I guarantee you I would not give up CPR not a chance okay in fact in all my time you know several thousand prisoners that I work with over ten years I can think of I think two guys maybe three that I'd give CPR to all right that's it hey why it's not that they're all terrible people it's it's me calculating my personal best interests all right so that's that's how that works that doesn't make me you know that that doesn't make me less or bad or anything else mother Theresa I don't know anything about her and you know that's no goal for Humanity to be phenomenally selfless in any bizarre way at all or our job here is to do a good job of living to be very to be as happy as we can and to you know be be benign and helpful within the reasonable range of our interests fantastic now really quick question before we end what can you offer about someone who somewhat someone I know for a long time there we've talked about evolutionary psychology and this kind of ideas of altruism and and Hamilton's rule now that I know it's a rule not a law could they have said very often that it irritates them or it feels morally wrong when people are so calculating regardless of whether or not it you know ends up being for the both both people's best interest what can we infer about that well I think that what you're hearing is that the when you are calculating that in essence you're looking at Deception hmm so in other words so the person who is doing the calculating and is gaming it out in their head is is probably using some deception in order to set a chain of dominoes in in a row so that they can get the reactions that they're seeking so that that is probably so it's it's kind of disturbing this individual because they can sniff this and nobody likes to be quote played but you don't like the fact that that people might deceive you even if they're being helpful in some kind of crafty way for you to not understand what all the motivations are okay so but you know sorry welcome to the real world okay this is part and parcel of human behavioral dynamics so the reason why people might do that is because you have something that they value and they're not sure that they can get that any other way and so that that's why it is that they feel like it's in their best interests to be a little bit crafty about what all their computations are and to cloak from you some of those computations while they can go about the business of getting whatever it is that they value most in that process they may be very helpful they may be very altruistic they may in fact I've seen many cases of this where the altruistic person way overshoots what it is that they needed to do to a guarantee that resource on the other side but they did it anyway they had to play very very carefully in order to make sure they got a document sign that they got a letter of recommendation etc etc or whatever it was that the planning committee allowed them to build their garage okay very often people need you know feel the need to be careful because the other side of a transaction may hold far too much power in some way morally legally physically or otherwise monetarily and so as a result you know the people sometimes feel they need to be crafty and that you know the fact that they do so and that they can they can be they can manipulate us in ways that we're not seeing all their computations because they've quote them this is just part of life so you know you the the more you happen to be in a position where you have a resource that people value a lot and they can't figure out to get to it the more likely they're to be deceptive I'm reminded that long ago bela de pollo who was a fine experimental social psychologist did research showing some of her research was is that a highly attractive women were better at detecting deception than everybody else and her inference was that's because they've been lied to more often so that that you know that made some sense well that reminds me of that TV show lied to me I watched a couple of episodes and one of the characters they asked her if she's had any deception detection experience and she said yep I've dated a lot of men and of course that's fair that what it is all right dr. Lyle thank thank you so much the wonderful answer is great great little topic on Hamilton's rule altruism kin selection and which where you would direct your resources if they were unlimited all cool alright fantastic have a wonderful night thanks for listening if you like what you hear subscribe write us a review or share this podcast with a friend to send in a question or read more about the show you can visit our website at wptz.com cast for finding happiness in the modern world you
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