Altruistic Behavior

In the article, “Evolution and Our Inner Conflict”, Edward O. Wilson depicts the origins of human behavior and development and the conflict in knowing how we derived. Wilson explains altruistic behavior as “the force that lifted pre-human social behavior to the human level” (Wilson, Pg. 1-2). Altruistic behavior means our instinct to show unselfish concern for the welfare of others. He introduces this by arguing for multilevel selection; stating “hereditary social behavior improves the competitive ability not of just individuals within groups but among groups as a whole” (Wilson, Pg.2). Wilson favors multilevel selection over kin selection; kin selection is defined as “a mechanism for how helping relatives may increase an individual’s fitness,
Wilson doesn’t deny that humans have intrinsic wants and self fulfillments but, he believes that humans are organized in groups. He proves this by biological evolution. Through evolutionary research it is proven that hereditarily humans have an obsessive interest in other humans, where humans are naturally able to read the intentions of others. Another hereditary characteristic of humans is that we have an urge to belong to groups, naturally. Wilson encourages altruism even further by going back to our ancestors over time; the homo sapiens, homo habilis, and homo erectus. Our ancestors through trial and error of working individually and in groups learned that working simultaneously benefited them and with that “[....] social intelligence grew, along with the centers of memory and reasoning in the prefrontal cortex” (Wilson, Pg. 4). Wilson argues that individual-level selection isn’t sufficient to explain our evolution, “within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but group of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals” (Wilson, Pg. 4). This is not saying that individuals shouldn’t think for themselves, they should, but being selfish isn’t very