Self-Sacrifice

You know that human "self-sacrifice" thing? You know, when someone gives up their life to save one or more other people, like their family or crew. What's that all about then? How can that kind of behaviour evolve in a creature using our best current understanding of evolution?

I mean what does it achieve for the individual? Nothing. You might argue that in the case of sacrificing yourself to save your relatives, it helps copies of your genes to survive. But hang on here, when that impulse kicks in, you're basically dead a few minutes later, you don't have time to pass these genes on to anyone else. But then I guess that any genes that increase your ability for self-sacrifice automatically protect close relatives that will be also be carrying those genes.

So like if I'm surrounded by my family and I decide to die to save them, those genes are going to passed on more successfully than if my self-preservation/cowardice had kicked in, and I had allowed my relatives to die. Or would they?

What if I'm younger than the people my dying saves? They could be my grandparents. What then? Would I make a snap subconscious decision to prioritise myself? It seems to depend more on my emotional contact than in any kind of subconcious weighing up of probabilities (on my patent "Geneto-monitor"). This also explains why people would sacrifice themselves to safe non-related individuals (Wars are good for examples of this). The emotional contact overrides any kind of blind genetic manipulation, like the soldier taking a bullet for his mate because he knows he's got 5 kids at home.

Maybe it's a very broad-minded genetic trait. Maybe it's parameters of operation are somewhat wider than immediate relatives. Maybe it starts from "same species" down.

That's a pretty wild and wacky set of genes there. What an incredible behavioural mechanism that would be (or indeed is) - by simply producing an individual with an impulse for self-sacrifice, not bound by familial ties (see Larry Niven's book "Protector"), these genes assure that by saving as many other individuals as we can, any copies of themselves carried by those individuals are also saved.

There doesn't seem to be any case that humans were any less or more self-serving in the past, although it's not really something you can get accurate figures for, so perhaps it's not a very successful genetic trait, merely managing to...tread water, so to speak...for the past 50,000 years. On the other hand, information about instances of "self-sacrifice" is pretty sparse, since you just never got to hear about it.

Maybe you still don't hear of most of the times it happens. Maybe it happens a lot more than you think. Maybe it's a very successful set of genes in there. Maybe without it, the human race would have perished thousands of years ago.