Evolution and The Selfish Gene
This night, during my sleepless hours, I started reading a new book: The Selfish Gene. Usually I tend to finish a book before writing something about it, but in this case there has been some passages in the first pages that I consider really interesting.
Richard Dawkins writes that the species are competing in what Darwin called “the struggle for existence“, where the individuals seems best regarded as pawns in the game. So the species with a large number of individuals ready to self-sacrifice themselves for the good of the specie itself are the less likely to go extinct. This is the theory of the “group selection“, quite different from the “individual selection“. If in a group where the people are ready to sacrifice themselves there is one selfish rebel, prepared to exploit the altruism of the others, then he is likely than the other to survive and, in the game of reproduction, to have children. In the long run, however, the more the selfish individuals there will be, the less the group will be altruistic, lowering the possibility of survival of the specie itself.
Maybe it has been the sleeplessness, but I have found this idea quite interesting.
A selfish individual is therefore highly likely to succeed when he is in an altruist group. But he must remember that to maintain his status he should not allow the other selfish individuals to became the majority of the group, or he will lose all his benefits. This sounds quite interesting while thinking to a villain for a book: too many times they are so unrealistically evil, selfish and idiot that they destroy everything they have.
That’s why many selfish will lie to everyone telling them to be part of the self-sacrificing group and promoting this behaviour.
Cant as a strategy.