Mutual benefit can promote the evolution of preferential interactions and in this way can lead to the evolution of true altruism

Evolution of culture-dependent discriminate sociality: a gene-culture coevolutionary model

Animals behave cooperatively towards certain conspecifics while being indifferent or even hostile to others. The distinction is made primarily according to kinship as predicted by the kin selection theory. With regards to humans, however, this is not always the case; in particular, humans sometimes exhibit a discriminate sociality on the basis of culturally transmitted traits, such as personal ornaments, languages, rituals, etc. This paper explores the possibility that the human faculty of cultural transmission and resultant cultural variation among individuals may have facilitated the evolution of discriminate sociality in humans. To this end, a gene-culture coevolutionary model is developed focusing on competition over control of resource as a context in which discriminate sociality may have evolved. Specifically, two types of culture-dependent discriminate sociality are considered: ingroup favouritism, with ingroup and outgroup being distinguished by the presence or absence of a cultural trait; and prestige hierarchies, with the prestige being conferred on the bearer of a cultural trait. The model specifies the conditions under which emergence and evolutionary stability of the two types of discriminate sociality are promoted by the presence of cultural variation among individuals.

Altruism and antagonistic pleiotropy in Penna ageing model

The Penna ageing model is based on mutation accumulation theory. We show that it also allows for self-organization of antagonistic pleiotropy which helps at young age at the expense of old age. This can be interpreted as emergence of altruism.

Evolutionary, neurobiological, gene-based solution of the ideological “puzzle” of human altruism and cooperation

Despite hundreds of published articles about humankind's eusocial behaviours, most scholars still regard the origin of human altruism and cooperation as an enduring puzzle, because it seems incompatible with two central tenets of evolution, namely, the competition between individuals and the consequent selective advantages of selfish traits. This "puzzle", however, rather than being due to insurmountable scientific difficulties, is to be attributed to two powerful ideologies, which are politically opposite, but nevertheless concurred to prevent scholars from solving it. One ideology rejects the concept of genetic determinism, whereas the other dislikes the concept of group selection. As a consequence, these widespread ideologies, which are common in the scientific community, too, kept scholars from realising that the puzzle of human altruism and cooperation can only be solved by proposing a theoretical model that is based precisely on both genetic determinism and group selection. This model, which was never advanced in published papers, is presented here. This article also proposes to regard ancestral environments as determinants of human eusociality. By contrast, virtually all previous articles about it leave primitive habitats unmentioned. To support the hypothesis that human unselfish behaviours represent genetically conserved traits that evolved ancestrally, not products of cultural transmission, this paper also discusses six groups of arguments in the section "Genes versus culture". Finally, this article advances a purely genetic evolutionary explanation for the uniqueness of human eusociality, thereby challenging prevailing cultural explanations for the incomparably developed levels of cooperation in humankind, which are observed in no other social species.

Mutual benefit cooperation and ethnic cultural diversity

We show that mutual benefit cooperation can favor the evolution of a preference to interact with individuals that are similar to themselves with respect to one or several arbitrary cultural tags. One necessary requisite to obtain this result is an asymmetry between partners in such a way that one of them (actor) proposes the cooperation and elects the partner, whereas the other (receiver) never rejects the offer because cooperation always reports benefits. The advantage of individuals possessing allele for preferential assortment is due to receiving more offers of mutually beneficial cooperation when there is linkage disequilibrium between the assortment locus and the cultural tags. An especially favorable scenario for the evolution of such preference is a subdivided metapopulation. In this case, the homogeneity within populations and the divergence between populations is favored, facilitating the existence of ethnic groups.