Gene for generosity in humans

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by tantalus, Dec 10, 2010.

  1. tantalus Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    66
    didnt realise but I cant post a link, so here is the reference for the paper

    Individual differences in allocation of funds in the dictator game associated with length of the arginine vasopressin 1a receptor RS3 promoter region and correlation between RS3 length and hippocampal mRNA. Genes, Brain and Behavior (2008) 7: 266–275.

    I believe it is available through Google scholar


    from abstract
    Hopefully this hasnt been discussed before, this paper provides support for a genetic basis for generosity, people with the allele of the long-long type were found to be more generous, whereby participants were gived 50 shekels (could keep it, real money) and could choose to keep it or give any amount of the 50 to a stranger, people with a certain allele type (long-long) on a gene, which was identified before the study, gave more than people who had the long-short or short-short alllele. Figure 4 in the paper graphs the results.

    What does everyone make of the paper?
    Is the replication adequate? they only studied 203 individuals
    Does anyone know of further related work?
    would you like to know which allele type you have?
     
    Last edited: Dec 10, 2010
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. LtPsyOps Registered Member

    Messages:
    3
    Genes obviously play an important role in people behaviors, but I think that individuals with certain alleles, for example "the generosity allele" also must have had a strong external factors that contributed to their behavior. For example, say someone has the allele, and their parents, or teachers are also generous and consistently show them, it would instill these values making the allele more prevalent. That is just my take on this. But I feel like most of our human behavior, whether it be greed, jealously, generosity, compassion, etc. all come one gene or another. Its the way everyone is essentially the same yet different. Some genes/ alleles play a stronger role than others, which could be due to their body chemistry as well as the external factors.

    Another thing that goes along with this, in a way is that there is a scientist that did research on monkeys and saw that monkeys also exhibit generosity/morality. So if it is in our gene/DNA, do we truly need religion? That took it to a whole new level..

    Interesting stuff all of this is..
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. tantalus Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    66
    good point, I hadnt considered this additional effect, ofcourse it is more complex than any one gene determining a trait such as generosity in humans (given the importance of many environmental stimuli and chance events), but it is interesting to see the correlation from the paper between the allele type and generosity (amount given) and you show how the gene would promote an environmental factor such as nurture in addition (from parental in your example).


    you may be referring to a study on Rhesus monkeys in 1964 which were starved, they were offered food, as it they could pull a chain to receive it, but to do so would result in another monkey receiving an electric shock, one monkey refuses to eat for 12 days

    another study looked at chimps
    this is the reference, cant post links til you have made 20 posts in case you are not aware of it
    Spontaneous Altruism by Chimpanzees and Young Children.Warneken et al., 2007, PLoS Biology.

    this indicates generosity


    someone was telling me about work done on twins (multiple sets of twins) who had been separated (at birth I presume) and the level of similarity in behaviour, personality and simple personal behavioural preferences down to how they named their pets, this indicates a huge influence in genetics, sadly I am not familiar with the work or author, perhaps someone might jump in and enlighten me...anyone?
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. 420Joey SF's Incontestable Pimp Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,189
    Such dna existing would prove there to be a god IMHO



    enviormental trigger supressible genes external factors all play a role IMHO
     
  8. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    33,264
    They found that I have the gene "I Don't Give A Shit" so I'm immune to most things that beg for my money.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  9. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,690
    One of the traits of our species that is hard-wired into our neurons and therefore has to be programmed into our DNA is our pack-social instinct. Like most of the other apes, a great many other primates, and species in other orders and suborders such as dogs and cetaceans, our psychology makes us naturally congregate in small extended-family units, depending on and caring for pack-mates whom we've known since birth. This gives us an advantage over solitary animals of similar size and capabilities.

    Generosity, up to a certain level that varies greatly from species to species, is mandatory in a pack. We share, we assist, we protect, that's how the pack survives and prospers. "Morality" is just a broader category of behaviors of which generosity is merely one example. You don't injure a pack-mate or steal his food: you need him to be strong to help you capture bison or fend off an attack by a pack of lions. Generosity and all of morality is simply "enlightened self interest."

    We long ago transcended our natural extended-family tribal organization and now our "packs" number in the millions or hundreds of millions, including anonymous strangers we've never even met. But we're still motivated by the understanding that as the pack prospers, we all prosper. We have overridden our instinctive behavior (to live among intimates) with reasoned and learned behavior (to enjoy the rich benefits of civilization by treating strangers with the courtesy that our instinct insists is only deserved by intimates). This is not natural; inside each of us there still lives a caveman and occasionally he has a bad day or a bad experience, becomes fed up with the tradeoff, gets all Paleolithic, and does something nasty. But most of the time most of the people are content with this and civilization continues to advance.

    But our ability to be generous to strangers and to live morally among people we haven't known since birth is based upon our genetic programming: we are a pack-social species. It would be much harder for a race of intelligent tigers or orangutans to develop civilization, since they don't trust and care for others of their kind except in the extremely narrow circumstance of mating.
     
  10. tantalus Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    66
    I am not familiar with this term. Iam not sure this is a good way to describe this if you want to apply it to
    in terms of the word social yes, but not under what I would understand as the term pack, an active hunting group, but yout term applies to more than just hunting.

    this is largely true and I agree with your general approach of considering human behaviour in evolutionary terms. However cooperation of individuals can also exist for a slightly twisted self interest in that if kin (closely related) individuals are successful (in reproduction), that is more likely to result in the helper's genes being passed on (as he shares a great deal of genetic similarity), so it is worth helping family members as they share a great deal of genetic similarity as there exists this additional benefit (but it also ofcourse benefits the helper-direct self interest). This is often considered an additional factor in cost-benefit analysis of behaviour of certain species (it appears conspicuously for species where individuals do not offer any reproduction and instead help others, I dont know if this is considered also to be an evolutionary driving factor for humans in part, but it seems likely it does for at least some other species, I guess in your pack social instinct social terms the gene pool could be considered the whole closely related pack and not the individual, however we have muddied the waters some what. Even if it does not in humans, in the very least it illustrates that behaviour does not always have to benefit oneself directly in all species/instances. This includes what we may define as generosity.


    hmmm, I wonder biologically and philosophically about this. We humans have muddied the water no doubt, for example can it be said really that natural selection applies to humans anymore, it is a tricky business.
    Should learned and reasoned behaviour be considered outside what we consider instinctual and fitting the natural selection profile, this capability also evolved and has allowed us to flourish, perhaps this is instinctual behaviour dressed up, I am not comfortable with taking the view that certain human behaviour has escaped the end goal and that we have escaped your pack form and have thought ourselves to ignore instictful behaviour to allow civilisations and strangers to flourish, evolution has brought this capability about, I would view it as evolutionary experiment. In short I would not agree with stating the original pack-tribal social organisation
    as the instinctual form and modern civilisation as an escape, although I see where the argument for this division arises, we have muddied the waters.......

    I would be slower to draw a vast divide (see post 3 above regarding other species) between humans and all others species. Don’t get me wrong, humans have brought social behaviour to a whole new level and have blurred the situation and made things difficult to interpret but I would not confine all others behaviour of all other species to the narrow set of circumstances you referred to (as in mating) and I would also say that a great deal of human behaviour we perceive to be outside Darwinian fitness is not.

    I think the interpretation and resulting classification of human behaviour in its diversity regarding Darwinian fitness (survival-reproduction) is crucial here and we must be careful of anthropocentrism in this interpretation/classification.
     
  11. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,690
    I have never found the proper biologist's word for this. I distinguish pack-social from herd-social. Packs are relatively small (I don't think that in any species their number goes to three digits), have a leader and perhaps a hierarchy, they actively support each other (to a degree that varies from one species to the next) and they are hostile to other packs.

    Herds have no hierarchy; if they have a leader it is usually a female whose only job is to take them to the next grazing area and anyone who doesn't accept her authority is free to leave; they don't put much effort into supporting each other, basically using strength in numbers to thwart predators and often leaving weak offspring behind when attacked; they are indifferent to the proximity of another herd and will merge with it; and they don't have much of a social order, regarding each other with the minimal courtesy of anonymous strangers, such as not knocking each other down.

    Instinctive pack-social behavior is not limited to predators. Horses are pack-social, and so are gorillas. And I'm not entirely sure that the herd-social instinct is limited to grazers: hyenas congregate in such large numbers that they can drive off a pack of lions and steal their kill, and AFAIK they do this without leadership, simply organizing dynamically to get the job done. I have no idea if they will stop to rescue an injured colleague or just eat him.
    This is surely the evolutionary basis of the pack-social instinct: the survival of the pack is a key tactic in the survival of the gene pool.
    Since I'm veering off into territory that I have never found discussed in the articles I've read, I don't have the terminology, but clearly there are other kinds of social instincts besides pack and herd. As you point out, many insects exhibit hive-social behavior, which is distinctly different from either pack or herd. I also suspect that the flock-social behavior of many birds is yet another type. And the more we learn about dolphins the less I would be surprised to find that they have their own unique type of social instinct.
    And that's my point. I do not for a moment discount the behaviors we have developed consciously over the millennia through reasoning and learning. The creation, maintenance and improvement of civilization violates our pack-social instinct, yet most of us, most of the time, accept it unremarkably because it clearly improves our survivability, comfort and joy. Nonetheless, my point is that the pack-social instinct was the catalyst for this, because we have the instinct to be kind and generous, so it was only a matter of redirecting it outside the pack. This is not something that a member of a species of solitary hunters or grazers could do.
    It's not binary. Natural selection is still in progress, but it doesn't play as important a role as it used to. We'll spend a billion dollars if we have to, to keep Stephen Hawking alive in an affront to the entire notion of natural selection. I wouldn't even be surprised if women were queuing up at a sperm bank to have his children. Nonetheless I doubt that this would have happened if he were born into a less prosperous community in a region where university educations are out of reach to the average citizen.
    On the contrary, I see humans as the bridge from DNA-based life to a new lifeform: civilization itself. It is a super-organism of which we are the cells. The individual cells die but the organism lives on. After all, it satsifies most of the criteria that define life. At a minimum: growth, metabolism, homeostasis, organization and response to external stimuli.

    Darwin didn't see this but the whole concept of evolution was so revolutionary and controversial that he can be forgiven for the lapse... much less writing about it to the people of that era!

    Just as Gauss and Weber, arguably the inventors of the telegraph that marked the dawn of the Age of Electronics, can be forgiven for not predicting the internet.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  12. tantalus Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    66
    thanks for the exchange of ideas Fraggle Rocker

    .
    there is no consensus (controversial word these days ) on how to define life or the criteria, but that is another interesting thread waiting to be discussed

    this is one place where we have not come to agree on yet, so I will challenge this view again (politely ofcourse

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    )., I see this as interpretation, i would not refer to it as a superorganism for alot of reasons, it is social organisation as we are a social species like other species and is part of what you referred to as a DNA-based life (not a new lifeform imo), it is this division which I am uneasy to agree on, as I discussed in my previous post

    see as of yet I am not prepared to make this division (between pack-social and civilisation), the division you referred to where we have used reasoned behaviour to escape and create modern civilisation, something you consider separate from our instincts.

    I see it as one and the same and the creation of civilisation is part of out natural repertoire, as in we have havnt escaped and what as happened is thanks to evolution in so much that this behaviour I would still consider to be instictual, purposeful and part of the process although this is a tough position to defend biologically, less so philosophically imo.


    I think it would be useful if I elaborate further on this, traditionally when I think of all other species and the behaviour they exhibit, I think how does that benefit survival and reproduction (darwinian fitness) (as a general rule), for humans It appears that a great deal of our behaviour does not relate to the tenets of darwinian fitness, when I rfer to behaviours, I mean sticking your chewing gum under the table

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    , helping a stranger-old lady across the street etc, I mean everything, every example of human beahaviour, so the question does alot of this escape darwinian fitness, this is when anthropocentrism, intepretation and resulting classification becomes crucial, as we are an intelligent species (in traditional terms), our behaviour and it's diversity is also, this makes it a complex business but I think alot of the behaviour that people may view outside darwinian fitness is infact not, that it offers some benefit (it the use of energy amd often these days money) or because altruism is part of our self-interested starategy or that the pack social gene pool must be passed on or that being part of a civilisation offers benefits or that cheating when everyone else cooperates can prove very fruitful, you see I am attempting to make thhis classification, so meanwhile I dont subscribe the division you referred to and that we have escaped with reasoned thought, I would say on the contrary...

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    It seems appropriate to introduce an additional concept to this conversation, called spandrels in evolutionary biology) that I disussed in a thread about lying in this forum, knowone has replied (I would put a sad face here but am limited to 3 images, followed by a wink)
    here is what I said
    spandrels must also be considered imo when considering why certain human behaviour exists, in this case certain human behaviour does not fit the drive for darwinian fitness directly but It is along for the ride and indirectly it makes sense
     

Share This Page