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Posted: 18-03-2005 21:23 Post subject: Altruism & the Charity Robot

from The New Scientist

Posted: 21-03-2005 06:59 Post subject: Re: Altruism & the Charity Robot

Posted: 21-03-2005 09:18 Post subject:

Posted: 05-03-2006 18:57 Post subject:

I told you so! Very Happy

Posted: 08-12-2006 16:47 Post subject:

Posted: 22-01-2007 12:28 Post subject:

Posted: 15-01-2009 10:35 Post subject:

Victorian novels helped us evolve into better people, say psychologists
Classic novels like Dracula and Middlemarch instilled the values of cooperation and the suppression of hunger for power
Ian Sample, science correspondent guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 14 January 2009

The despicable acts of Count Dracula, the unending selflessness of Dorothea in Middlemarch and Mr Darcy's personal transformation in Pride and Prejudice helped to uphold social order and encouraged altruistic genes to spread through Victorian society, according to an analysis by evolutionary psychologists.

Their research suggests that classic British novels from the 19th century not only reflect the values of Victorian society, they also shaped them. Archetypal novels from the period extolled the virtues of an egalitarian society and pitted cooperation and affability against individuals' hunger for power and dominance. For example in George Eliot's Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke turns her back on wealth to help the poor, while Bram Stoker's nocturnal menace, Count Dracula, comes to represent the worst excesses of aristocratic dominance.

The team of evolutionary psychologists, led by Joseph Carroll at the University of Missouri in St Louis, applied Darwin's theory of evolution to literature by asking 500 academics to fill in questionnaires on characters from 201 classic Victorian novels. The respondents were asked to define characters as protagonists or antagonists, rate their personality traits, and comment on their emotional response to the characters.

They found that leading characters fell into groups that mirrored the cooperative nature of a hunter-gatherer society, where individual urges for power and wealth were suppressed for the good of the community.

The effect of such moralistic literature was to uphold and instil a sense of fairness and altruism in society at large, the researchers claim in the journal Evolutionary Psychology. "By enforcing these norms, humans succeed in controlling 'free riders' or 'cheaters' and they thus make it possible for genuinely altruistic genes to survive within a social group," they write.

Jonathan Gottschall, a co-author at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, told New Scientist magazine that in Victorian novels, dominant behaviour is stigmatised. "Bad guys and girls are just dominance machines, they are obsessed with getting ahead, they rarely have pro-social behaviours," he said. But the more cooperative a group became, the more likely it was to survive and spread its values.

A few characters were judged to have both good and bad traits, such as Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Jane Austen's Mr Darcy. The conflicts they demonstrate reflect the strains of maintaining such a cooperative social order, Carroll said.

Stoker's Dracula and many of George Eliot's characters were more black and white. "Dracula is a nobleman and represents aristocracy at its most brutal. He's not just asserting prestige, he's actually taking people over and absorbing their life blood," he said.

The researchers believe that novels have the same effect on society as oral cautionary tales of old. "Just as hunter-gatherers talk of cheating and bullying as a way of staying keyed to the goal that bad guys must not win, novels key us to the same issues," said Christopher Boehm, a cultural anthropologist at the Unversity of Southern California. "They have a function that continues to contribute to the quality and structure of group life."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jan/14/victorian-novels-evolution-altruism

Posted: 15-01-2009 12:30 Post subject:

And Lewis Caroll helped us to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Posted: 28-02-2010 18:57 Post subject:

Posted: 16-04-2012 14:07 Post subject:

Posted: 16-04-2012 20:43 Post subject:

I'm very sceptical about that good influence of the Victorian novel article. It tends to assume that what the Victorians read was the worthy stuff that has survived. But the most popular novelist of the day was not Dickens but George Reynolds whose lurid pot-boilers were semi-pornographic in their cheap thrills.

When we browse the shelves of old bookshops today we tend to find the plush gift-books and Sunday-school prize fodder which gives a very partial view of Victorian reading habits. Most of the cheap stuff has tended to disintegrate rather more quickly but an increasing amount is available online. I wish I had seven lifetimes to explore it! Smile

Oh Joy! I see there is an online edition of The Mysteries of London!

victorianlondon.org/mysteries/mysteries-00-introduction.htm

I can't get this to display correctly as a hidden link but at least it is short. I think the board expects html as suffix. Question

Posted: 16-04-2012 21:46 Post subject:

Posted: 09-10-2013 21:39 Post subject:

Digital Human - Series 4 - 1. Altruism

Aleks Krotoski explores what technology tells us about ourselves and the age we live in. In this first programme; is the digital world allowing us to be more altruistic than ever?

So does altruism exist online? With all the stories of cyber-bullying and trolling it's very easy to forget the random acts of kindness that the technology also allows. Aleks explores some amazing stories of online altruism. But when no good deed goes unpublished and you can keep score of your goodness through 'followers', 'likes' and the accompanying boosts to ego and reputation is truly selfless altruism online an impossibility? And in the end, if good gets done does it matter?

Contributors: Primatologist Frans De Waal, Psychologist Dana Kilsanin, Founder of Random acts of pizza Daniel Rodgers, YouTube DIY guru Chez Rossi

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03c2zw6/Digital_Human_Series_4_Altruism/

Available until
12:00AM Thu, 1 Jan 2099

Broadcast on
BBC Radio 4, 4:30PM Mon, 7 Oct 2013

Food for thought!

Posted: 10-10-2013 08:27 Post subject:

Making Time: Does it matter why we help others?
By Sam Judah, BBC News Magazine

Is altruism simply self-interest in disguise? And can a mathematical equation hope to answer the question?
In 1968, an academic almost unknown in the UK walked into University College London and presented its staff with an equation so remarkable, that they offered him an honorary position and the keys to his own office.

His name was George Price, and his equation addressed a problem that has vexed scientists since Charles Darwin published On The Origin of Species more than a century earlier. If we are selfish creatures, engaged in a battle for survival, why do we display altruism? Why do we show kindness to others even at a cost to ourselves?

A range of theories have since been posed, and the roots of Price's answer were hinted at in the early 1950s by the British evolutionary biologist, JBS Haldane. When asked if he would sacrifice his own life to save that of another, he said that he would, but only under certain conditions. "I would lay down my life for two brothers," he said. "Or eight cousins."

Haldane's reasoning was a simplistic explanation of a theory that has come to dominate evolutionary biology - that of "kin selection".
Since he would share 50% of each brother's genetic makeup, and 12.5% of each cousin's, his genes would survive even if he were to die.

It took until the early 1960s for another scientist, William Donald Hamilton, to popularise the theory. He wrote a simple equation to explain that an organism would demonstrate self-sacrificing behaviour if it would enhance the reproductive chances of those it was closely related to.

In 1967 Price arrived in London from the United States, where he had been a scientist and journalist, but with no background in the field of evolutionary biology.
He discovered Hamilton's theory in a public library and thought he could improve upon it. Working in seclusion, he rewrote the equation in a simpler but more wide-reaching way. It explained the relationship between different generations of a population, and could be used to show how the prevalence of particular traits would change over time.

Although it was a fairly simple statement, it had never been expressed in clear mathematical terms, and the staff at the University College London recognised his insight as wildly original.

A debate about the scientific roots of altruism still rages to this day, but kin selection remains a hugely influential theory, and Price's contribution is held in high regard by many.

"It underpins a lot of modern evolutionary biology research," says Andy Gardner, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, who uses the Price Equation in much of his work.

Oren Harman, who wrote Price's biography in 2010, says the view is shared by plenty of people in the field.
"Although there are those who fail to see the precise use of the equation, others think of it as the most simple and brilliant description of the dynamics of natural selection."

But Price began to find the implications of his work very difficult to deal with, according to Harman. If altruism was simply an attempt to ensure the survival of one's own genes, could it be considered altruism at all?

Lee Dugatkin, professor of Biology at the University of Louisville, thinks it was this thought that triggered a major change in Price. "That was what got him going," he says. "He was so depressed when he found out that Hamilton was right."

In the summer of 1970, Price became a devout Christian and embarked on a radical project - giving himself over to the service of others.
"He was going to go out to try and show that human beings are the only species that can beat out their own nature. And he was going to do that by becoming a pure selfless altruist," says Harman.

Price began giving money to homeless people, and invited many of them to live with him in his flat near Oxford Circus. His increasingly erratic behaviour left him penniless. He left his flat and eventually moved into a squat in Kentish Town.

It is not universally agreed that Price's equation triggered his downfall - he was undoubtedly suffering from some form of mental illness as well. And in the winter of 1975, Price took his own life.

For Harman, the two are inextricably linked. "I think the fact that George killed himself due to his interpretation of the equation really focuses the problem to the utmost degree."

Price's story is laced with tragedy, but need his scientific work imply a dark, depressing view of human nature?
Samir Okasha, professor of the philosophy of science at Bristol University, thinks not. "The idea that what evolutionary theory shows is that altruism is self-interest in disguise is, to my mind, a questionable thing to say."

Behaviour in some animal species is indeed genetically determined, he says, but with humans "that certainly isn't the case". He argues that culture sets us apart from animals in that respect, and points to the huge variance in social norms in different countries, and over short periods of time.
"We have seen rather dramatic change over, say, a 300-year period, which cannot be explained by genetics," he says.

Harman also disagrees with Price's interpretation of his own work. "It is not a necessary logical conclusion. It was his own conclusion, the conclusion of a troubled mind, but it's what led him to a terrible realisation that there is no true kindness in the world.

"If we want to understand behaviour, biology is part of it - it has to be by definition. But that's never an entire and complete explanation for the complexity and grandeur of the human condition."

Gardner thinks it is always possible to think of people as attempting to protect and reproduce their own genetic material. "But that's not necessarily always selfish," he says. "There's room for altruism in that logic."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24457645