We Are Built To Be Kind

http://youtu.be/SsWs6bf7tvI

"Survival of the fittest" still applies completely to humans if you take it in the sense that "fittest" is general fitness to survive, and not "ruthlessness, bloodthirst" and the like. Humans, being social creatures, having vulnerability, are best suited to survive as a group. Kindness shows us (on a personal level) to put the needs of the group above our own, showing that we will not be a detriment to group survival, and (on a group level) helps us to ensure that the greatest conditions for survival for the largest number of people in the group are met. This allows the group to thrive instead of merely survive.

I will in the foreseeable future be able to recommend The Selfish Gene and subsequently The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins on this topic. The idea is, that the unit of evolution is a gene rather than an organism and that genes that are better at surviving and replicating themselves tend to survive and replicate themselves more successfully than those that are inferior in those regards. Since in a population many genes are shared, to collaborate with a gene that makes the organism altruistic and kind to his contemporaries is obviously beneficial for the gene itself, since the gene is a trans-individual unit, not bound to any one organism but to the population. Genes that get along better with "altruism-promoting" genes will for obvious reasons be more present in future generations than those that in presence of those "altruism-genes" develop a negative effect on other aspects of the organism's body and behaviour. Of course one doesn't need to go this deep to account for the phenomenon of social behaviour in animals, but to stay on the individual-organism-level, if you will, will likely yield at best a scarce explanation for it and would still leave open the question of how "social plants" like grasses and nettles, to name an example would have come about. With the gene as your base unit these questions become almost trivial.

Yes thank you Gisteron.

It's common to believe that everyone has unique DNA, while you may have a unique combination of DNA (with the exception of a few rare cases) everyone of your genes exist it many many other people.

Also it's not about fitness in the sense of survival. Biologist define fitness as increasing you're gene frequency in a population which is usually done through reproduction by either the individual or someone closely related to them. This is why salmon die after spawning or a bee will sting you and die.

steamboat28 wrote: Humans, being social creatures, having vulnerability, are best suited to survive as a group. Kindness shows us (on a personal level) to put the needs of the group above our own, showing that we will not be a detriment to group survival, and (on a group level) helps us to ensure that the greatest conditions for survival for the largest number of people in the group are met. This allows the group to thrive instead of merely survive.

Gisteron wrote: Since in a population many genes are shared, to collaborate with a gene that makes the organism altruistic and kind to his contemporaries is obviously beneficial for the gene itself.

I agree with both of these points but am curious to know what social/genetic advantage there is for those who show kindness to beings we share very few genes with. A man who rescues a snail from the middle of the road for example, or one who frees thistledown from a cobweb. Does genetic advantage have any explanation for these acts of kindness?

There barely is any. There is, for reasons touched upon above, reasons why compassion and empathy in general would occur, especially in social animals like ourselves, but there is neither much of a reason for it to extend to any other than our own kind, of course, nor, for that matter, to be isolated to it and exclude any others. Obviously we are more compassionate with closely related beings than with distant relatives. Many like baby kittens or even baby horses. Cute is not something many would call tadpoles however.
And yet, to speak in layman's terms, compassion towards other life is 'simpler' than compassion towards other life that is closely related to yourself. We tend to most empathize with our own, because the individual compassionate genes, if you so will, overlap in their compassion most with whatever shares most genes with us. But since there is no reason why there be selection against distantly relative life, we would expect to see some of us being more considerate towards them. It would take positively hostile genes, so to speak, for it to be otherwise, and aside from hostility to, say, parasites, there is little reason why they would flourish.