ABSTRACT
When resources are limited, the main challenge for an adaptively minded individual is to strike a balance between investing in kin, ethny, and the whole species. The balance point shifts radically with contingency. Investment in any group is adaptive only when kept within the bounds set by Hamilton’s Rule for adaptive altruism. This involves a number of criteria.
Confidence of relatedness;
The genetic distance between ingroup and competing groups;
Group size;
The salience of intergroup versus interindividual competition;
Costs and benefits.
A further variable is not raised by Hamilton:
The availability of collective goods. Territory is a collective good fundamental for harmonizing familial and ethnic genetic interests and securing long-term genetic continuity.
I discuss strategies for meeting each criterion. Comparing optimal and actual strategies, the match is weakest where modern society differs most profoundly from the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness. In the evolutionarily novel environment of the urban centralized state humans are imperfectly adapted to recognize and defend their genetic interest, and must rely on cultural strategies to substitute for innate mechanisms. Ideologies act as fitness portfolios, affecting believers’ allocation of life resources across family, ethny, and humanity in general. Individualism, nationalism, and humanism are each adaptive under different circumstances, but in general the most prudent apportionment is family > ethny > humanity.
