Study confirms evolutionary link between social structure and selfishness

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Researchers revealed that less selfish behavior evolved under living conditions that forced individuals to interact more frequently with siblings. While the finding was verified with insect experiments, Rice University biologist Volker Rudolf said the evolutionary principle could be applied to study any species, including humans.

Rudolf, a professor of biosciences at Rice, said increased local interactions stack the deck against the evolution of selfish behaviors like cannibalism.

To understand why, he suggests imagining behaviors can be sorted from least to most selfish.

"At one end of the continuum are altruistic behaviors, where an individual may be giving up its chance to survive or reproduce to increase reproduction of others," he said. "Cannibalism is at the other extreme. An individual increases its own survival and reproduction by literally consuming its own kind."

He said it's also possible that a third factor, kin recognition, could also provide an evolutionary push.

"If you're really good at recognizing kin, that limits the cost of cannibalism," he said. "If you recognize kin and avoid eating them, you can afford to be a lot more cannibalistic in a mixed population, which can have evolutionary benefits."

Here is the source:. https://phys.org/news/2021-03-evolutionary-link-social-selfishness.html

I found this study interesting because I had never really framed cannibalism as a form of selfishness, more just pure evil. But it does make sense from a purely scientific point of view it is about surviving at the cost of others.

When it talks about kin it made me think of cultures where you have the mob and that certain last names are important and make you easy to link to "the tribe". For immigrant groups specifically those with strong roots that stick together have better survival rates and that's dependent on them having identifiable traits so that others know that you are part of their tribe that needs to be protected.

It also made me think about the difference in individualistic cultures and more interdependent cultures. You do see in areas like india populations being more densely packed together but say in the wild west everything was spread out; that definitely correlates with the difference in cultures they point out here.