Forget Survival of the Fittest: It Is Kindness That Counts (2009)
When I was working on evolutionary dynamics in the late 90s, a group of us from across the world were trying to build an evolutionary model that showed the emergence of altruistic behaviour.<p>It was really really difficult. Even knowing exactly the kind of behaviour we wanted to show, it wasn&#x27;t trivial to stack the dice enough to roll that outcome.<p>I have since read a lot of arguments, a lot of post-hoc reasoning that justifies why altruism might be a positive contributor to fitness. It is no coincidence they are almost all hand-waving, narrative arguments.<p>I don&#x27;t buy them. Show me the math.<p>Evolution is a perfect subject for handwaving and post hoc rationalisations. I do not think all of evolutionary psychology is bunkum, like some have claimed, but I do think a lot is unfalsifiable, motivated reasoning. My advice would be, unless it comes with good predictions of evidence from the historical biological record, or good experimental evidence from mathematical models of evolution, it was too easily come by to be considered knowledge.