it took roughly 2 billion years for life for occur
100,000 years for our evolved hominoid
about 10,000 for our conciousness
400 years for our society to evolve (agriculture, scientific revolutions, etc.)

looking at the nature of this evolutionary paradigm
its evident that we should be seeing this NEW evolution manifest itself
IN OUR LIFETIME
a NEW evolution
not the old, sterile, efficient way of evolution
but a new evolution of SELF
that stems from two types of information
digital and analog.

++++the digital being artificial intelligence

++++the analog being electro biology (the cloning of the organism)

and you link thedr two together with neurobiology.



in the old evolutionary paradigm
one organism would conquer the other
one would live, while the other would die off

but in the NEW evolutionary paradigm we would all exist as a mutually supportive grouping.

evolution now becomes an individual centered process, eminating from the needs and desires from the individual and not an external process, a passive process.

now imagine a neo human with a new individuality+
a new conciousness
this is only the begining of the new evolutionary cycle
because as the next cycle proceeds
the input is now this new intelligence
as intelligence pawns on intelligence
as ability pawns on ability
the speed changes
until what???

you reach a crescendo!
in a way, it could be imagined as an instantaneous fulfullment of human, and neo human potential.

it could be something totally different
it could be the amplification of the individual!
the multiplication of multiple existences!
parallell existences
now that the individual is not restricted by time and space.

these manifestations of neo humans COULD also be dramatically counter+intuitive.

these manifestations will be those of social adaptation:

parasitism, dominance, morality, war!!

These will be subject to deemphasis!
these will be subject to DeEVOLUTION!!

The new evolutionary paragidm will give us traits of truth, loyalty, justice, freedom, and this is what i hope to see.

People have a range of altruism versus self-interest. People without any altruism at all are unable to empathize with others. These people are sometimes labeled sociopaths, and make up a disproportionate part of the prison population.

of course evolution has always been acting on the benefit of the individual - in this case the brain increased in size as a result of that.

you're asking if selfish intent resulted in a dramatic increase in brain size? Are you kidding?

The basic idea of kin selection is simple. Imagine a gene which causes its bearer to behave altruistically towards other organisms, e.g. by sharing food with them. Organisms without the gene are selfish -- they keep all their food for themselves, and sometimes get handouts from the altruists. Clearly the altruists will be at a fitness disadvantage, so we should expect the altruistic gene to be eliminated from the population. However, suppose that altruists are discriminating in who they share food with. They do not share with just anybody, but only with their relatives. This immediately changes things. For relatives are genetically similar -- they share genes with one another. So when an organism carrying the altruistic gene shares his food, there is a certain probability that the recipients of the food will also carry copies of that gene. (How probable depends on how closely related they are.) This means that the altruistic gene can in principle spread by natural selection. The gene causes an organism to behave in a way which reduces its own fitness but boosts the fitness of its relatives -- who have a greater than average chance of carrying the gene themselves. So the overall effect of the behaviour may be to increase the number of copies of the altruistic gene found in the next generation, and thus the incidence of the altruistic behaviour itself.

Kin selection theory is often presented as a triumph of the ‘gene's-eye view of evolution’, which sees organic evolution as the result of competition among genes for increased representation in the gene-pool, and individual organisms as mere ‘vehicles’ that genes have constructed to aid their propagation (Dawkins (1976), (1982)). The gene's eye-view is certainly the easiest way of understanding kin selection, and was employed by Hamilton himself in his 1964 papers. Altruism seems anomalous from the individual organism's point of view, but from the gene's point of view it makes good sense. A gene wants to maximize the number of copies of itself that are found in the next generation; one way of doing that is to cause its host organism to behave altruistically towards other bearers of the gene, so long as the costs and benefits satisfy the Hamilton inequality. But interestingly, Hamilton showed that kin selection can also be understood from the organism's point of view. Though an altruistic behaviour which spreads by kin selection reduces the organism's personal fitness (by definition), it increases what Hamilton called the organism's inclusive fitness. An organism's inclusive fitness is defined as its personal fitness, plus the sum of its weighted effects on the fitness of every other organism in the population, the weights determined by the coefficient of relationship r. Given this definition, natural selection will act to increase the inclusive fitness of individuals in the population. Instead of thinking in terms of selfish genes trying to maximize their future representation in the gene-pool, we can think in terms of organisms' trying to maximize their inclusive fitness. Most people find the ‘gene's eye’ approach to kin selection heuristically simpler than the inclusive fitness approach, but mathematically they are in fact equivalent (Michod (1982), Frank (1998), Hamilton (1996)).

Contrary to what is sometimes thought, kin selection does not require that animals must have the ability to discriminate relatives from non-relatives, less still to calculate coefficients of relationship. Many animals can in fact recognize their kin, often by smell, but kin selection can operate in the absence of such an ability. Hamilton's inequality can be satisfied so long as an animal behaves altruistically towards others animals that are in fact its relatives. The animal might achieve this by having the ability to tell relatives from non-relatives, but this is not the only possibility. An alternative is to use some proximal indicator of kinship. For example, if an animal behaves altruistically towards those in its immediate vicinity, then the recipients of the altruism are likely to be relatives, given that relatives tend to live near each other. No ability to recognize kin is presupposed. Cuckoos exploit precisely this fact, free-riding on the innate tendency of birds to care for the young in their nests.

Another popular misconception is that kin selection theory is committed to ‘genetic determinism’, the idea that genes rigidly determine or control behaviour. Though some sociobiologists have made incautious remarks to this effect, evolutionary theories of behaviour, including kin selection, are not committed to it. So long as the behaviours in question have a genetical component, i.e. are influenced to some extent by one or more genetic factor, then the theories can apply. When Hamilton (1964) talks about a gene which ‘causes’ altruism, this is really shorthand for a gene which increases the probability that its bearer will behave altruistically, to some degree. This is much weaker than saying that the behaviour is genetically ‘determined’, and is quite compatible with the existence of strong environmental influences on the behaviour's expression. Kin selection theory does not deny the truism that all traits are affected by both genes and environment. Nor does it deny that many interesting animal behaviours are transmitted through non-genetical means, such as imitation and social learning (Avital and Jablonka (2000)).

The current issue of Scientific American describes some research with humans and primates that illustrates humans' superior sense of fairness. I suppose one could say fairness is is in one's self interest. However, like altruism, there is a range of fairness in people. Some people play fair all the time and others cheat. Extreme cheating can result in jail time, so I suppose that would be a non-adaptive trait (to the extent that society works well).

can the functional members of a society be thought of as a kinship group that punishes freeloaders then?

It is quite possible that natural selection would have favoured humans who genuinely do care about helping others, i.e. who are capable of ‘real’ or psychological altruism. Suppose there is an evolutionary advantage associated with taking good care of one's children -- a quite plausible idea. Then, parents who really do care about their childrens' welfare, i.e. who are ‘real’ altruists, will have a higher inclusive fitness, hence spread more of their genes, than parents who only pretend to care, or who do not care. Therefore, evolution may well lead ‘real’ or psychological altruism to evolve. Contrary to what is often thought, an evolutionary approach to human behaviour does not imply that humans are likely to be motivated by self-interest alone. One strategy by which ‘selfish genes’ may increase their future representation is by causing humans to be non-selfish, in the psychological sense.

Isn't "real" altruism described above still for self-interest, but only evolved to contain a conscious component of feeling "altruistic" as to hide the self-interest mechanism underneath?

Is there any explanation for genuine, non-biological altruism - i.e. adoption, saving strangers, humanitarianism? Were they a 'recent' thing or do they happen in primates or the pre-homo-sapien lineages?

I have been increasingly convinced that information qua information is what really evolves. We are simply developing the neurological architecture to process this information.