7.2 Kinship

A puzzle for evolution: emotions that incline us to be kind to others, like compassion and gratitude and so on.

• we know it’s a problem because we know there is altruism.
  • animals care for their young, they groom each other.
    • Vampire bats suck up the blood of some animal like a horse and consume some of it themselves, but then come back and regurgitate it into the mouths of their little vampire bat pups.
  • Richard Dawkins: “We are evolved altruists, but we’re not indiscriminate altruists.” A better way of putting it is animals are the vehicles that contain genes. And the genes are the replicators. An animal is merely the gene’s way of making another gene.