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This podcast discusses the effective altruism movement.
From an evolutionary perspective, social behaviours are those which have fitness consequences for both the individual that performs the behaviour, and another individual. Over the last 43 years, a huge theoretical and empirical literature has developed on this topic. However, progress is often hindered by poor communication between scientists, with different people using the same term to mean different things, or different terms to mean the same thing. This can obscure what is biologically important, and what is not. The potential for such semantic confusion is greatest with interdisciplinary research. Our aim here is to address issues of semantic confusion that have arisen with research on the problem of cooperation. In particular, we: (i) discuss confusion over the terms kin selection, mutualism, mutual benefit, cooperation, altruism, reciprocal altruism, weak altruism, altruistic punishment, strong reciprocity, group selection and direct fitness; (ii) emphasize the need to distinguish between proximate (mechanism) and ultimate (survival value) explanations of behaviours. We draw examples from all areas, but especially recent work on humans and microbes.
Abstract In recent years there has been a large body of theoretical work examining how local competition can reduce and even remove selection for altruism between relatives. However, it is less well appreciated that local competition favours selection for spite, the relatively neglected ugly sister of altruism. Here, we use extensions of social evolution theory that were formulated to deal with the consequences for altruism of competition between social partners, to illustrate several points on the evolution of spite. Specifically, we show that: (i) the conditions for the evolution of spite are less restrictive than previously assumed; (ii) previous models which have demonstrated selection for spite often implicitly assumed local competition; (iii) the scale of competition must be allowed for when distinguishing different forms of spite (Hamiltonian vs. Wilsonian); (iv) local competition can enhance the spread of spiteful greenbeards; and (v) the theory makes testable predictions for how the extent of spite should vary dependent upon population structure and average relatedness.