So many "challenges to evolution" we see presented suffer from a common flaw: they assume the modern form under modern conditions.
Picture this. You are running a modern car race for high-tech race cars -- "Formula 1", I think they're called, but with Model T's. No, still too high-tech ... with Cugnot steam wagons (1771 technology). Similarly, we are running modern warfare -- at a massive scale and at a high tempo and with several high tech weapons, sensor, and communications systems -- with soldiers based on "wetware tech" that developed at least 100,000 years ago, though more likely much earlier than that.
What were the conditions under which and for which our soldiers' "wetware" developed? Most likely under that same conditions that we have directly observed in hunter-gatherer societies -- though the basis for that wetware had been developing way back in the hominid stage and even before that, but for this discussion we should only need to go back to the hunter-gatherer tribal stage.
In such a tribe, many members would be related to each other (one of the reasons to obtain/abduct brides from other tribes). Now, kinship is not just confined to immediate families; one's nieces, nephews, and cousins will also carry one's genes, so enhancing
those relatives' ability to pass those genes along will also pass on one's own genes. We also have men serving together in hunting parties, many of whom should be related to each other in some way. So not only would acting to protect them, even at the expense of one's own life, fall under kin selection, but the tribe and its collection of your genes are also depending on the success of that hunt -- though we observe that most of the food in a hunter-gatherer tribe's diet tend to come from the gatherers' efforts. Plus, if something does happen to one of the members of the tribe, then, again though kinship within the tribe, that member's family would be cared for within that extended family (as opposed to the "every family entirely on its own" view of Reagan's so-called "traditional nuclear family"). Likewise, in tribal warfare, you'd be fighting alongside your own kin and defending your other kin in the tribe.
In the matter of "nature vs nurture", I see that not as an either-or view of an entire person, but rather as a continuum for examining individual behaviors. I do believe that there is such a thing as "human nature", the collection of emotional and psychological reactions, tendencies, and behavioral inclinations -- and, yes, even what we could call "instincts", though most use the word "drives" -- which is innate; ie, human nature is something that we inherit, which means that it must be passed on genetically, which means that it can evolve.
OK, that's the "nature" part, on top of which we place "nurture", what we're taught. In my view, every human behavior we observe is a combination of both "nature" and "nurture", on a continuum ranging from near-pure "nature" to near-pure "nurture", though the near-pure cases are the rare ones. IOW, virtually every human behavior we observe has been learned, but for that behavior to have been learned there needs to be something in human nature to facilitate that learning -- we see this used in training performing animals through
behavior modeling wherein the trainer exploits the animal's pre-existing behavior.
At first, human nature and human society "co-evolved", such that as our earliest ancestors had to form more efficiently functional tribes (using earlier loose tribes, which were possibly mainly extended families, as their basis), human nature had to evolve in individuals to enable them to function more effectively within those more efficient tribes. We reached a point where the tribal culture had developed behavioral standards and mechanisms for promoting social cohesion all based on the needs and proclivities of human nature, and human nature had developed to the point where tribal members felt inclined, even driven, to adhere to the tribal norms.
But then society started to change rapidly, developing into ever larger super-societies that encompass not only not-kin, but even ethically very diverse populations. Societies and culture can change rapidly, within a few generations and even within only one generation, whereas biological evolution requires many generations. Human nature just cannot keep up with the rates at which society and culture change. Back to the opening analogy, we find ourselves running in a modern high-tech race but using ancient technology.
We make up for it the only way we know how, but learning new behaviors and attitudes. However, since we cannot learn a behavior or attitude that is not supported by human nature (except for extreme cases, but then I'm talking about learning a behavior so that it becomes a "natural" part of us), those new behaviors and attitudes must co-opt an existing inclination. So while we still have kin to apply our kinship instincts to, society has co-opted that instinct so that our sense of "kinship" is extended towards other members of society, now called a "nation", even though they are not related to us; that is then called "patriotism", which is beneficial to society up to a point. This worked OK as long as most members of the earlier nations tended to be of the same basic genetic stock and sharing a common culture, but then those nations grew into even larger nations which encompassed populations of "others" who were of a different basic genetic stock and who had a different culture -- along with instincts about kin, we also developed instincts about "the others", those non-kin who very likely posed a threat to us and our kin. Regionalism developed in which an individual share multiple societal identities and loyalties, both to his local region and to his nation, and again it was an extension and modification of his sense and instincts about kinship that were employed and the national sense of kinship could abate the regional sense about "others". Now our nations have become both very diverse and very intermingled, such that they include people of many different genetic stocks and many different cultures who now live and work right next to and with each other. Racism is an expression of that sense of "others" who must be mistrusted, while at the same time the maintanence of social cohesion requires that we extend our sense of kinship to those perceived "others"; that is an on-going tension which we are trying to resolve and which we must resolve. On top of all that, our sense of kinship is now being extended to cover vast super-national regions, even to emcompass the entire human population of this planet. And as some have noted, it's being extended by some to other species. And we're trying to handle all this with 100,000-year-old wetware!
Militaries do need to train their recruits and they do a good job of it; they've had centuries to develop and perfect their techniques. And yet they are still restricted by that same 100,000-year-old wetware "tech", so their training techniques must (and do) exploit that wetware, not work against it -- and they also need to deal with what the recruits had already learned in society. For example, the vast majority of recruits come in having learned to
not kill another person, something reinforced by extended feelings of kinship. So one of the training techniques employed is to dehumanize "the enemy", such that their training becomes learning how to kill "the enemy" before "the enemy" can kill you and yours; soldiers and marines have described the shock of the first time they came face-to-face with "the enemy" and saw another scared kid, just like them. Their military trainers were exploiting their sense of kinship and "others", but it is a necessary and necessary technique.
Another kinship "instinct" that militaries exploit in their training takes us back to that ancient hunting party which our human nature had adapted us to. Getting the members to bond with the others in their unit -- actually, all you need to do is to form up the unit and have them work on common goals; the bonding happens naturally. Then place them in combat situations where everybody's survival depends on everybody else and you've set up the conditions for one guy diving onto a live grenade to save the rest of the unit. Having gone through basic training in a service that sends its officers out to combat (USAF), I cannot say with certaintude that the other services do not explicitly teach its recruits to dive onto live grenades, but I feel certain that they do not. I am sure that such scenarios may get discussed and I'm sure that it is impressed on them that they may need to lay down their lives and that their fellow unit-members are depending on them, but I do not believe that there's any actual training for diving onto live grenades ... at least not in our own military.
Doing something like diving onto a live grenade is not something that you objectively deliberate on, weighing all the pro's and con's relating to your ability to pass your genes on to future generations, but rather it is something that you just do. It's a gut-level reaction, something that you feel you must do. On PBS, Joseph Campbell related a case of a police officer having saved a suicide jumper by grabbing him just as he jumped, such that it was almost by accident that he didn't go down with the jumper and die himself -- all indications to the officer was that that was what would happen. When asked why he did it, he answered that he would have died if he hadn't acted. It is certainly part of those professions' training, knowing that when action is called for, you must act; I've been in that situation myself and there's no hesitation involved.
But for that "instinct to act" to have been placed there by training, there has to be a basis for it in our innate human nature. And kinship selection is the best explanation we seem to have for how that basis would have evolved.
Mind you, I'm not a professional, so it would be interesting to see how scientists have approached the question.
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