Good and evil will be rewarded in the end - there are so many topics about good and evil. Basically, we believe that being good at ourselves and caring for others is kindness.
From a biological point of view, there is no moral standard of goodness, and the similar word is: altruism.
When the moon is in the sky, vampire bats emerge from the cave at the deepest point of the night. It flies at low altitudes and hunts by smell and sonar. Once the bat finds its victim – it can feed on most warm-blooded animals, from small songbirds to large cows – it begins stalking its prey.
The bat silently lands on the ground, then uses its wings to prop up the ground and slowly sneak close to its prey, slicing a tooth sharper than a scalpel into the flesh. Blood oozes from the wound, bat**.
Vampire bats have long been fashioned into legends by literature, but there is another reason why it has aroused the interest of biologists: they are very selfless.
Bats live in vast colonies, and hundreds or thousands of bats share the same dark cave. Bats had to eat constantly – they starved to death within sixty hours – which led to the evolution of an unusual way of sharing food.
If the vampire bat fails to find its victim during the night, it will begin to lick under the wings and lips of its partner. Then, the well-fed partner began to vomit warm blood. Scientists estimate that if this sharing is not made, more than 80% of adult vampire bats will die of starvation each year.
Darwin saw the problem of altruism – the act of helping others, paying a high personal price – as a potentially fatal challenge to his theory of natural selection. In his book The Descent of Man, he writes that a man who is willing to sacrifice his life for the sake of his companions often does not leave offspring to inherit his noble nature.
After all, if life is a brutal "struggle for survival", how can a selfless person live long enough? Why does natural selection favor a behavior that makes us less likely to survive?
Yet, as Darwin and all of us know, altruism is a real phenomenon in nature: bats feed hungry companions, bees and ants die to defend their nests, animals raise offspring that don't belong to them, and we humans jump on subway tracks to save strangers.
The universality of these behaviors shows that kindness is not a failed strategy in life.
A century after Darwin, altruism remained a paradox.
Then, the first rays of light appeared.
A biologist named Haldane drank too much and discussed with his peers at the bar about situations in which he would sacrifice his life to save others.
I would jump into the river and save two brothers with my own life, but if only one brother fell, I would not save them; Or, I'm willing to sacrifice myself to save eight cousins instead of seven. "
This drunken answer sums up a powerful scientific thought. Since individuals share most of their genome with their close relatives, if their relatives survive,"Me"genes are persistent. According to Haldane's moral arithmetic, making sacrifices for family members is just another way to boost the odds of our own DNA continuity.
A graduate student in the Department of Mathematics expanded Haldane's drunken remarks into a formal mathematical theory, a simple equation: RB>C.
Taking into account correlation (r), the gene of altruism evolves if the benefit of an action (b) outweighs the cost of the individual (c).
At this point, altruism can be easily explained in genetic terms.
The Australian grey-crowned thrush (Pomatostomus tempalis) is a small woodland bird with a curved black beak, and its young males have long puzzled biologists.
They don't behave like impulsive adolescent teenagers, looking for mates and getting involved in territorial battles – but are content to stay at home, in their parents' nests.
What's even stranger is that they spend a lot of time helping to raise younger siblings, hatching eggs and collecting food for the extended family. This behavior is known as cooperative breeding. The same goes for common magpies and crows.
Why do males waste their best years at home instead of competing to breed?
When the researchers were in the experiment, manipulate the number of auxiliary birds in the nest. When male adolescent helpers were removed, the survival rate of their younger siblings plummeted.
By calculation, the equivalent of each assistant will produce 16 additional offspring, this benefit helps to compensate for their own reproductive losses.
rb>c。But it's worth noting that most of the time, this equation is just an elegant façade – it can only be applied in a very specific experimental environment, and when applied in the real world, the equation becomes very complex and cannot be actually calculated.
Biologists also see this equation only as a framework for understanding the world, an important principle that helps us understand the altruistic behavior of bats, ants, and other species.
In other words, this equation is just a short summary, like Darwin's natural selection.
Mathematics seems to solve biological problems, but it raises a moral question: it shows that altruism is not true good at all. Rather, it's just another way to spread our genes.
Can true altruism still exist? Is generosity a sustainable trait? Or are creatures inherently selfish, and our goodness is nothing more than a mask?
Any mathematical explanation does not imply that human beings consciously calculate gains and losses when doing altruistic acts. Instead, evolution has shaped the psychological mechanisms that promote certain altruistic behaviors, such as emotional, moral.
In the final analysis, it is Darwin's idea that is more reliable, he said: human kindness and generosity may have evolved into an emerging attribute - not individual, but collective.
Cooperative groups thrive and replicate, while selfish groups wither and die.
Selfish individuals, in the face"Kindness"altruists will take advantage of it. But altruistic groups will defeat groups made up of selfishists.
Deception, selfishness are ubiquitous in nature, but kindness is actually also an adaptive trait that allows more cooperative groups to outperform their cousins. Kindness is also a biological force.
Finally, for you and me, if choices at the personal level are the only thing that matters, then we are completely selfish; If our behavior is completely driven by the group, then we become robot-like collaborators like ants.
You and me, in between.
The author thanks for your interest (-
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