14 DAY TRIAL // According to anthropologists, the development of one of the most noble feelings in the world today, altruism, may have started on the battlefields of the Stone Age, when our ancestors learned the value of selflessness in winning battles. The researchers came to these conclusions after devising a computer model of cultural evolution and inter-group conflict that spanned a period comprised of humankind's most brutal years, in terms of war.
The conclusions of the new paper, which was published Thursday in the respected journal Science, show that it was a time of war and conflict that essentially gave rise to a feeling that today is considered noble, Wired informs.
“Altruism will be strongly favored if it leads groups to win wars. That would counteract the way that selfish individuals usually dominate the altruistic ones in their groups,” explains in the journal entry Santa Fe Institute economist and institutional theorist Sam Bowles, the author of the paper.
Experts say that, indeed, placing the roots of this feeling in such a violent type of behavior may seem like a stretch at first, but they also point out the fact that having genes for altruism, compassion and selflessness goes against the theory of evolution, which basically states that we should only have the tendency to be selfish.
However, in the animal kingdom, some species have developed cooperation traits, with the sole purpose of helping accelerate their evolution. In the vast majority of these cases, the animals only help those of kin with them, and not all members of their species.
Humans are the only group in the world to have evolved selflessness to such an extent that we now feel we should help when we see someone we don't know on the street, being in need of assistance. “The selfish gain on the altruistic, but once in a while, the groups composed of selfish guys get clobbered in competition with groups that have altruistic individuals,” Bowles states.
In other words, researchers say, it may simply have been too much of a hassle inside of a small group to engage in selfish behavior at one point in time, especially considering that, for the largest part of history, mankind was structured in small groups, living together under precarious conditions, and not having any institutions or leaders.
In such circumstances, caring and helping one another was essential, and this could very well be the type of behavior that led to the development of genes coding its future development. Altruism may have easily developed from such an “origin,” the experts conclude.