jimmenegay{at}sbcglobal.net (Jim Menegay) wrote in message
news:...
> For a young person growing up in bourgeois Western society,
> one of the vicissitudes of the process of socialization is
> that perfectly natural self-serving behaviors will be met
> with the query: "What if everyone did that?".
> 
> It is a difficult question to even understand, let alone
> answer.  I have always been partial to Dunbar's response
> in Heller's "Catch 22": "Well, if everyone did it, then
> I would be a damned fool to do any differently!"
> 
> I have heard that this query can be blamed, ultimately,
> on Emmanuel Kant.  (If I have heard wrong, don't expect me
> to actually READ Kant to educate myself - I have recently
> gone thru the ordeal of reading Hamilton, and that was bad
> enough.)
> 
> It has recently occurred to me that in Darwin's Natural
> Selection, Nature never asks Kant's question.  Organisms
> are expected to behave self-servingly, even though "if
> everyone did that" the self is ill-served.  Ironically,
> Nature sees to it that everyone does do that, though She
> doesn't take the inevitable consequences of Her own actions
> into account.  As a result, every individual may suffer
> from an evolutionary change that was to the benefit of each
> individual.  To claim that this is paradoxical is to commit
> the fallacy of composition, as that fallacy is defined by
> economists.
> 
> I has also recently occurred to me that in Hamilton's kin
> selection model, Nature DOES ask a watered down version of
> Kant's question.  In Hamilton's model, Nature asks the
> question: "What if everyone whose genome is correlated with
> yours did that?".  Or better, "What if everyone did that to
> the extent that their genome is correlated with yours?".
> 
> Please note the use of the words "correlated with", rather 
> than "similar to".  I have just been thru this issue with
> Hoelzer and McGinn.  If everyone is similar, then no one
> is correlated.
> 
> Food for thought, even if Dr. Wilkins will disapprove of the 
> anthropomorphism.

This is essentially the Tragedy of the Commons, as outlined by Hardin
in 1968, and LLoyd George a long while before that. And yes, it can be
solved by relatedness, for exactly the reason you mentioned. Well
done!
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