EbooK The Co-Evolution of Love and Hate
Far from being uniquely modern, the welfare state is just the most spectacular example of a virtually ubiquitous aspect of society over the entire life course of anatomically modern humans, namely, the sharing of food, information, and other valued resources among genetically unrelated members of a group. The frequent electoral endorsement of this process of sharing suggests that the altruistic predisposition to help those in need and to contribute to the pursuit of common goals is quite widespread. Equally ubiquitous, both in modern society and over the millennia, is a predisposition to favor one’s own kind in friendships, economic activities, mating, and coalitions, and to hold an unfavorable evaluation of “outsiders” and even a willingness to inflict severe harm on them.
These parochial predispositions are often manifested in and heightened by institutions governing esidential patterns, access to resources, sexual reproduction, and inter-group warfare. Both altruism and parochialism are puzzling from an evolutionary perspective, as both would appear to reduce individual pay-offs (fitness or material well-being) by comparison to other members of one’s group eschewing these behaviors. Lower payoffs, in turn, are expected to result in the elimination of these behaviors in any population governed by any dynamic in which lower relative payoffs result in a declining frequency of the behavior.
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