this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Approaching kindness or generosity from a biological point of view seems (to me) to lead to The Prisoners' Dilemma. Everyone is better off if we are all generous, but if I can't trust others to be generous, I'm better off being selfish.
IMHO, religion is an evolutionary adaptation to "solve" this problem. It might have worked in small communities, but not in our global society.
I'm rambling...
It sounds like you might really enjoy an episode of Radiolab, The Good Show, on this very topic, the evolution of altruism. Indeed, digging into it leads them to the Prisoner's Dilemma. One of the segments covers a competition organized by a computer scientist around an iterative cooperate/defect game. Entrants tried to come up with an algorithm that would maximize the benefit to the 'player' in repeated rounds against the computer. I won't spoil it by revealing which algorithm won, but I'll say it's really fascinating.