p238

Book entitled  The Origin of Values

There is a book with a very fascinating title:  The Origin of Values (edited by M. Hechter, L. Nadle and R. E. Michod; Aldine de Gruyter, New York, 1993), but the book discusses only the genesis of value within the social contexts.

Is human altruism due to intergroup conflicts?

It is very likely so.

Lethal intergroup competition promoted human altruism (?)

S Bowles Group Competition, Reproductive Leveling, and the Evolution of Human Altruism

Science  314 1569 (2006)

(BG) Group selection has long been judged untenable on empirical grounds for most species. But there have been no empirical tests of this explanation for humans. 

*The author's empirical estimates (see table 4 for hunte-gatherers) show that genetic differences between early human groups are likely to have been great enough so that lethal intergroup competition could account for the evolution of altruism. 

*The mechanism seems to presuppose advanced cognitive and linguistic capacities, possibly accounting for the distinctive forms of altruism found in our species.

Altruism and Parochialism evolve hand in hand

Choi et al., The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War

Science  318 636 (2007)

Parochial altruism could have evolved if parochialism promoted intergroup hostilities and the combination of altruism and parochialism contributed to success in these conflicts. Under conditions likely to have been experienced by late Pleistocene and early Holocene humans, neither parochialism nor altruism would have been viable singly, but by promoting group conflict, they could have evolved jointly.

A paper appeared that corroborated the preceding paper:

Oxytocin drives parochial altruism

De Dreu et al., The Neuropeptide Oxytocin Regulates Parochial Altruism in Intergroup Conflict Among Humans

Science  328 1408 (2010)

Oxytocin promotes in-group trust and cooperation, and defensive, but not offensive, aggression toward competing out-groups.

Intergroup conflict is strong enough to promote costly altruism in humans

S Bowles Did Warfare Among Ancestral Hunter-Gatherers Affect the Evolution of Human Social Behaviors?

Science  324  1293 (2009)

*I ask a more precise question: If more cooperative groups were more likely to prevail in conflicts with other groups, was the level of intergroup violence sufficient to influence the evolution of human social behavior?

*The estimated level of mortality in intergroup conflicts would have had substantial effects, allowing the proliferation of group-beneficial behaviors that were quite costly to the individual altruist.

`Love thy neighbor’ is just to love your neighbor persons and not to love the members of other groups of human beings. R. Dawkins,  The God Delusion  (Houghton Mifflin Company 2006) around p253 says:

‘Love thy neighbor’ didn’t mean what we now think it means. It meant only ‘Love another Jew.’ The point is devastatingly made by the American physician and evolutionary anthropologist John Hartung (he has written a remarkable paper on the evolution and biblical history of in- group morality, laying stress, too, on the flip side ― out-group hostility).

This, as a consequence, may have been the mechanism that kept the population density far below the environmental capacity, and allowed all the groups to last stably. Just the repulsive core or Pauli’s exclusion principle stabilize matter, the aggressiveness of organisms can stabilize ecosystems. Domestication allows high-density breeding by weakening aggressive impulse. Therefore, feral animals can easily destroy their environments. 

A long term fox domestication experiment tells us many interesting things about what happens if aggressiveness is selected out.

Hare et al., ``Social Cognitive Evolution in  Captive Foxes Is a Correlated By-Product of Experimental Domestication,’’

Curr Biol  15 , 22 (2005)

*45 year domestication experiment of red fox selected for fearless and nonaggressive approach to humans.

*Resultant fox kits are not only as skillful as dog puppies in using human gestures but are also more skilled than fox kits from control population.

*It is likely the observed social cognitive evolution did not require direct selection for improved social cognitive ability.