Man introduces benevolence, mercy, altruism, into the world, and he pays the price in his added burdens; and he reaps his reward in the vast social and civic organizations that were impossible without these things.
John Burroughs: The Gospel of Nature
True altruism, by definition, is a losing evolutionary strategy for individuals. Altruism increases another’s fitness while decreasing one’s own. Some behavior like caring for offspring may look like altruism but can be explained by kin selection. Kin selection means increasing your own genes’ fitness by helping their copies in a close relative, and it doesn’t count as altruism. Some other altruistic-seeming behaviors are based on reciprocity and therefore don’t qualify either. Pine trees don’t provide seeds to squirrels because they’re altruistic, but because they want the seeds to spread.
Evolutionary theory makes it implausible that group selection could lead to altruism. That’s because any genes encoding altruistic behavior would selected against. Individuals that don’t act altruistically but benefit from the action of altruists would outcompete them. Truly altruistic behavior is therefore exceedingly rare in nature and may not exist at all. There are anecdotes of animals like dolphins helping other animals in distress, but there are no unambiguous and recurring examples of non-human altruism that can’t be explained any other way.
Humans on the other hand frequently behave altruistically. We’re altruistic not just toward other humans, but also toward other animals and the rest of nature. We help drowning bugs, we avoid cruelty to animals if we can, we give money anonymously. Compared to most other animals, we’re great to be around.
We don’t know why humans are altruistic while other animals aren’t. My preferred explanation is that our consciousnesses encourage altruism. Some of this may be innate, and some is likely to be influenced by culture. What speaks for innateness is that small children can behave altruistically. On the other hand, some of that behavior may simply be copied. What speaks for the importance of culture is that the degree to which we care about each other and about nature differs between different cultures and over time.
I think consciousness encourages altruism by making us understand that there are things that are more important than our own fitness. To grasp this likely requires a certain amount of intelligence and reflection, which may not be accessible to other animals. None of this explains how our altruism-encouraging consciousnesses evolved in the first place and I recognize that this is therefore unsatisfying.
I’d be interested in counterarguments to human altruism being unique, because I can’t think of any. That we’re often behaving selfishly doesn’t negate the fact of our frequent altruism. That we have done damage to nature and keep doing so doesn’t negate that we also go to great lengths to avoid further damage even though this doesn’t benefit us personally. That we sometimes behave altruistically because this makes us feel good or raises our status is also beside the point. Why would an act make us feel good unless we recognize its goodness? Clearly, we behave altruistically because we recognize it’s the right thing to do, not for ourselves, but for something greater than ourselves.
Our capacity for altruism is what sets us apart. If we ever encounter an intelligent alien species, one of the most important questions will be of they’re also altruistic.
Nehaveigur 