Hi Stephen Push, and welcome to the fray.
Are you saying that altruism has evloved as a result of group selection?
Yes, and that selection then operates on the group, so that the group that selects altruistic behavior has better overall success at survival and reproduction.
If so, could you elaborate on how altruism could become fixed in a population despite the existence of non-altruists?
By punishment of the non-altruists.
Just a moment...
quote:
Both laboratory and field data suggest that people punish noncooperators even in one-shot interactions. ...
In laboratory experiments, people punish noncooperators at a cost to themselves even in one-shot interactions (10, 11) and ethnographic data suggest that such altruistic punishment helps to sustain cooperation in human societies (12). It might seem that invoking altruistic punishment simply creates a new evolutionary puzzle: why do people incur costs to punish others and provide benefits to nonrelatives? However, here we show that group selection can lead to the evolution of altruistic punishment in larger groups because the problem of deterring free riders in the case of altruistic cooperation is fundamentally different from the problem of deterring free riders in the case of altruistic punishment. This asymmetry arises because the payoff disadvantage of altruistic cooperators relative to defectors is independent of the frequency of defectors in the population, whereas the cost disadvantage for those engaged in altruistic punishment declines as defectors become rare because acts of punishment become very infrequent (13). Thus, when altruistic punishers are common, individual level selection operating against them is weak.
We can also find evidence of this behavior in other primates, where non-altruistic behavior is punished. Unfortunately I've lost the link to the article I had that showed this in capucin monkeys )there are many that show cooperative behavior and a sense of fairness in perceived rewards).
Enjoy.
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