Evolutionary Explanation and the Ideal of Altruism: the Incommensurability of Journal for

The integration of an evolutionary origin of human behavior with the capacity to symbolically idealize concepts such as altruism may help our understanding of the human yearning for transcendence and its biological roots. Biological adaptation has somehow created a brain that yearns for transcendent idealizations of behavior beyond our capability such as utopian ideals of altruism. We explore whether or not evolutionary explanations of altruism show that self-sacrificial behavior is a biological adaptation, a transcendent ideal, or some combination of the two. Using adoption of non-relatives as a model, we review existing data to determine if adoption behavior is altruism or if sociobiological explanations sufficiently show it to be egoistic. Human adoption practices are mostly amenable to evolutionary explanations. The best one can say about most adoption practices with respect to self-sacrifice is that they exhibit pro-social behavior, not altruism. In those few cases where adoption appears to be genetically altruistic, the behavior is most often explained as mis-directed adaptive behavior. To explain the exceptions that still exist, celibates who adopt, in this way is a form o