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Beer Drinking Networks In Amazon Tribe Help Explain Altruism
KentuckyFC writes "The Tsimane tribe are hunter-gatherers living in the forested region between the foothills of the Andes and the wetland-savannas of the Llanos de Moxos in Bolivia. They drink beer made from boiled manioc (a type of sweet potato) which they chew and spit into the mix to trigger fermentation. After a week or so, the resultant brew is about 4 per cent alcohol. Now anthropologists studying this tribe say the way they host beer drinking events for each other offers important clues into their culture. At issue is the question of altruism: why people spend considerable time and effort doing favors for others that don't directly benefit them. The answer from studying these beer drinking events is that the favor is quickly returned by the guests in the form of another beer drinking event. This helps to build good relations with neighbors and family. And when the beer drinking invite is not returned, the researchers speculate that this is probably because there is some other favor involved, such as helping to gather or prepare food, suggesting mates or political co-operation."
counter example lots of fights, rapes, and mruders just after 2AM
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Supply chain engineers in Seattle hoisting cold ones for Jeff Bezos.
Doing something for someone else with no expectation of it being returned is altruism.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
why do researchers feel they need to study tribal communties to learn about society? I mean, couldn't we get the same inferences by asking any 22 year old college student why he throws a kegger at his house?
Also, TFS doesnt seem to indicate the obvious answer (for both tribal and modern societies). Parties are just fun...even for the host who might be the one who buys all the beer/food/entertainment.
That's a truism. But on the other hand, they're not some kind of beneficence cult. All true "ism"s would attach other kinds of baggage to the favors.
Do you know how you can tell a queer?
He drinks Pimms while we drink beer
I'll take that Ph.D. now.
unless I didn't like you
Is there any thing beer can't do?
I don't see how this explains altruism, this explains self interest. It's no different than chimps taking turns picking lice off each other. (Disclaimer: I had chimp-like ancestors. Also, I am not saying chimps and the people in TFA are equivalent). Altruism is jumping on a live hand grenade, or taking on a predator while the rest of the troop flees.
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This is hardly a new theory of 'altruism' and I fail to see how it is relevant to /. Marcel Mauss laid the foundation of such gift-giving rituals way back in 1925 and it's been a well-studied topic since.
I bet if Islam allowed alcohol they'd all be a lot less cranky.
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best of intentions to our genuine spiritual allys, mostly hungry kids (millions (1,000,000 X~)) world wide again today we blame the fictional deities or complete innocents who have no (0) options left we pinksters tag as unambitious as we pretense behind our 'defense' of 'our way' (majority excluded) of life which looks like some kind of reverse polarity sci-fi nightmare to the vast majority of us uns not to mention the disregard for us & lowest motive misuse of OUR resources against us
The answer from studying these beer drinking events is that the favor is quickly returned by the guests in the form of another beer drinking event.
You mean I scratch your back, you scratch my back? That's not not altruism, that's trade.
I don't know if a favour is expected in return, but there's something in us that makes us want to help others who've helped us anyway.
It seems obvious that altruistic behaviour would be a result of the fact that a species that helps each other is more likely to survive. It might also have side effects, like wanting to help any living creature to survive.. but as long as that doesn't damage the original species' reproductive abilities, there's no reason for that behaviour to be selected out.
which is totally what she said
People who hang out and drink together get along. Sometimes. See Irish pub fights for the counter-example ;)
Altruism doesn't exist. This has been debated before and there is no proof that altruism is anything other than misdirection. This would be an actual story if they could support a claim that altruism exists. But this is just another report from the desk of Captain Obvious.
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You needed a study to figure this out? I think science jumped the shark.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
They drink beer made from boiled manioc (a type of sweet potato) which they chew and spit into the mix to trigger fermentation. After a week or so, the resultant brew is about 4 per cent alcohol.
In before the first derpling herps up a comparison to American beer. Herp herp derp.
All true "ism"s
I see what you did there.
Is this strictly the result of their culture being more stripped of modern conviences, i.e. industrialization and technology, or rather that living in such a simplistic and repeatable manner is actually easier?
Having recently done a long-distance hike, several months and over a 1000 miles, where every day was the same repeatable events(wake up, eat, hike, stop, eat, sleep), I'd argue that it is a much simpler existence when exact daily repitition, to consistent weekly repitition with minimal distraction outside your environment, comes into play. I'd imagine beer, and the slight intoxication inolved with the tribes consistency, only makes such a minimalist existence quite enjoyable.
In contrast, if you take any one of the 100 or some people I could name off the top of my head, and remove them from society and all technology from them for a week, I'd say less than 5 would be able to mentally copy with such a situation.
In short: unplug from time to time. ALL OF YOU! And take some beer along while you do it!
What a load of bollocks. An hour in the pub watching how a round of drinks works could have saved a lot of time and effort.
"The answer from studying these beer drinking events is that the favor is quickly returned by the guests in the form of another beer drinking event. "
Uhm, DUH. Obviously these scientists stopped getting invited to parties when they couldn't figure out that they also needed to host every now and then.
Different vs deviant... nice choice of words.
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> "The answer from studying these beer drinking events is that the favor is quickly
> returned by the guests in the form of another beer drinking event"
The professor, from the US or European intelligentsia, then rubbed his chin, "Government should force people to have these voluntary reciprocity invites! But not with beer. Or soda pop. Well, not sugar soda anyway. Or diet."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
See also pathological altruism: "behavior in which attempts to promote the welfare of another, or others, results instead in harm that an external observer would conclude was reasonably foreseeable"
Could be that drinking (beer or whatever) is an example of a shared group experience that enhances interpersonal bonding. So, is it the booze or the underlying culture that explains the altruism? Can one identify cultures that emphasize other shared experiences which also enhance such effects?
I don't have anything against drinking, per se. But if I can make a conscious decision to join a group that is characterized by some shared activity, I might want to select one that has fewer negative consequences and more positive than hanging around bars.
Have gnu, will travel.
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So we are pretty far along these directions. Research on reciprocal altruism like this beer drinking ritual by some tribals is minor compared to the extensive work done on the bats regurgitating blood to share food with bats who did not have a successful hunt.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Anyone interested in the sociology of altruism should read "the Social Conquest of Earth" by Edward O. Wilson. He uses Occam's Razor to attack kin selection theory, and supports his own theories of social cooperation.
Doing something for someone else with no expectation of it being returned is altruism.
I agree with that. It seems little different than the "round buying" that goes on in bars/pubs. When one buys a round, there's a reasonable expectation that everyone in the group will in turn buy a round. Unless you have a guy like Bob, who's always broke, but he's very entertaining to drink with, and a good guy. I guess we're buying him rounds for entertainment and companionship, so even that's not pure altruism.
Because the Tsimane don't have local bars, and making up a batch of brew is such a pain, it looks like they came up with a way to take turns being treated so that one is treated more often than one has to treat. Hardly altruism.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
And when the beer drinking invite is not returned, the researchers speculate that this is probably because there is some other favor involved...
A simpler explanation; they served really crappy beer.
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I agree. But the thing that, at least in the summary, seems to be glazed over is that these people could choose to make their own beer and keep it to themselves. Instead of being purely selfish, they're choosing to do something for their community (which will still help themselves).
Manioc (also known as cassava) is NOT a variety of sweet potato.
Neuro-toxins explain altruism ...
Hey Neighbor,
I chewed up some sweet potatoes, spit them into a pot and left it sitting for a week or so. Wanna come over and have some? ...
And somehow this is now a tradition.
1. Currying favor to be redeemed at a later date.
2. Release of chemical bliss, aka, smug superiority
3. Drinking with others is far more entertaining than drinking alone
There you go. Where's my research grant, which I totally won't spend on a boat?
Beer is the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
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I think one stumbling block of evolutionary studies is the notion to consider anything to be perfected.
The reason that altruism does not always make sense (according to a pure 'selfish gene' standpoint), may well be that it doesn't.
We've developed a few genes that makes part our brain mirror what our fellow beings experience. If we see someone suffer, we feel bad too.
Most of the time, that makes sense from an egoistic standpoint. Some of the time, it doesn't.
Altruism is no more a mystery that our preference for certain kinds of food.
Enjoying sweet, fat and protein-rich food is good for humans - except for when it isn't.
No sig to see here. Move along.
No, not really. Selfish gene theory explains why somebody would do something even if it actually does have a negative expected value for the individual - because it has a positive expected value for (some of) the individual's genes, which are also in the benefitting individuals. (The boxes we draw around ourselves as "individual" are significant, but i still ultimately a philosophical construct, and to some degree arbitrary.)
Let's see if there is a similar effect amongst those sharing bong hits... I don't know I feel sort of unmotivated about that study....
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I agree that doing behavior research on traditional cultures confers an unwarranted aura of respect. They could conduct the same study on a gang in LA, or a church congregation in the midwest, and the results would be just as valid. There seems to be some assumption that they are a fountain of truth because they are primitive and without guile, whereas we are so cultured that our instincts rarely manifest themselves.
Having not read TFA and barely skimmed TFS, I do feel like adding an anecdote here regarding American culture. I have many friends that brew beer. They generally enjoy the process and really like sharing their beers with their friends, even those of us who don't brew. Sure, they're probably more likely to get invited to bbqs and dinners, but it's not like they actively expect something in return. These guys are definitely treating more often than they are treated.
You may notice among your friends that some of them host bbqs or dinner parties more often than others. It's not that they're after some tangible gain from you, it's usually that they either genuinely enjoy cooking or your company. Or they want to sleep with your wife.
+1 Disagree
That's why this discussion and the way TFA researchers define 'altruism' is completely usesless.
I hate bashing research outright...i'm not saying this research is bad b/c it's "obvious"...I'm saying it's bad because they use contradictory and overlapping definitions for the factors they test.
do you believe in Karma?
if so, *everything* you do has an expectation of being returned!!!! that means everything you do is selfish and therefore not altruistic.
see how these terms get muddled very quickly?
the problem is scale...on what scale do we measure "expectation of return"?
Thank you Dave Raggett
Chewing the manioc doesn't trigger fermentation; the saliva and maceration triggers the conversion of starches into sugars. It is the yeast (and bacteria) in the environment (especially the skin of the vegetable) which ferments the resulting sugars into alcohol.
It seems little different than the "round buying" that goes on in bars/pubs. When one buys a round, there's a reasonable expectation that everyone in the group will in turn buy a round.
It isn't. Many older and smaller societies have an exchange culture based on exactly this kind of structure: Invite the neighboring village over for your festival and feed them/or adorn them with gifts; expect to be invited to their festival and adorned with equivalent effort of gifts.
You can do this when the groups are small enough to keep track that everyone is contributing fairly and you can shun those who don't. Once your society gets too big, you have to resort to exchange of goods and services for tokens of trust. That lets you pass favors-owed around the community much more efficiently and with much greater immediacy and flexibility than dinner parties. Humankind is built on millennia of exchange systems, because the grass is greener on the other side.
Dang... I thought there was some beer drinking network though the Amazon servers.
It seems obvious that altruistic behaviour would be a result of the fact that a species that helps each other is more likely to survive.
Yes... but evolution does not work like that. If it were an advantage to be selfish, rather than altruistic, the species would become more selfish, even if this decreases the viability of the species. This can be seen with stable populations of animals that select largeness to some degree - larger males are in some species are more often selected for breeding than smaller males. However, this can lead to the species as a whole becoming more dependent upon the exact environment, less adaptable, and therefore more likely to be wiped out.
The ideal for males in these species is to be as large and powerful as possible, and survive. Being average, efficient and adaptable means that you won't reproduce.
the question of altruism: why people spend considerable time and effort doing favo[u]rs for others that don't directly benefit them...the favo[u]r is quickly returned...
So, the same answer we've had for the last 150 years.
There doesn't have to be a tangible gain. The satisfaction of making your own beer and having other people drink it is itself a gain (although not tangible). Pretty much all "altruism" can easily be explained by psychological egoism.
When I'm at work, and a really nice customer has a problem, I can do the bare minimum and keep my job. But for these people, who are unfortunately less common than the dick heads, I very often go out of my way to hook them up the best I can, knowing that I will only get my same poverty-level wage I'd normally get anyway.
Why do I do this? Well, I think I do it to sort of reward the person for being polite and treating me like a person. That behavior is already rare, and in our society (USA), it seems like it's disincentivized (apparently that's not a word, but it should be.)
Yes... but evolution does not work like that. If it were an advantage to be selfish, rather than altruistic, the species would become more selfish, even if this decreases the viability of the species.
That's only true if there is no social consequences for selfishness. As long as the altruism comes with other things like ostracism, shunning, etc, for the individuals found to be selfish, the group can do a pretty good job at surviving. As long as you are more likely to thrive in the society by cooperating than you are to be a cheater with risks of being caught and outed, then it makes sense to cooperate.
As the number of cheaters goes up, it becomes more adaptive to spend more time and energy policing cheating. As the number of cheaters goes down, this extra time/energy spent policing becomes wasteful. Usually it's a game of cat and mouse with the cooperators and the cheaters, and some equilibrium point is reached.
Also, all of this goes out the window if you look to the gene as the unit of selection rather than the individual. This already makes a lot of sense considering that it is quite common for parents to put the survival of their offspring above their own (i.e. an offspring has a higher chance of spreading genes into the future than a parent). Treating the gene as the unit of selection simply extends this idea beyond parent/offspring relationships.
The ideal for males in these species is to be as large and powerful as possible, and survive. Being average, efficient and adaptable means that you won't reproduce.
You are referring to sexual selection, which is often an opposing force to natural selection. Natural selection selects for adaptability, while sexual selection can select for any number of ridiculous things like peacock feathers. Sexual selection is kept in check by natural selection, as you need to survive in order to reproduce.
Obviously people are altruistic because it makes them feel good. The question is *why* does it make them feel good (i.e. is there an evolutionary drive to be altruistic?).
Why do people eat food? Why do the have sex?
Well because food is delicious and sex feels good, obviously. But there is an underlying reason why food is delicious and why sex feels good, and that reason is evolutionary in nature. Those things feel good because we are supposed to do them to improve our (i.e.our genes) chances of survival.
The scientists discovered human being can cooperate. What a scoop!
Considering theses behaviors as odd just shows how Western societies fundamentals are rotten. People help members of their family for free. Why doing the same for neighbors would be so strange?
the species would become more selfish, even if this decreases the viability of the species
Yep and if it decreases the viability, then your line has more chance of dying off. That's the whole point.
I was reading an article a few months ago where they reckoned that Neanderthals were actually smarter than humans, but they were less social. They were less likely to share new ideas between villages for example, and so we became more advanced than them as a result of our greater sociability.
Evolution does "work like that". If the altruistic behaviour of the species helps a member survive and reproduce, then it has affected the "fitness" equation. It doesn't preclude any kind of selfish behaviour, but it does help to explain feelings of wanting to help random strangers, or risk your life for a drowning child for example.
which is totally what she said
' in which yeast eat the sugar and excrete ethanol.'.
This is not exactly correct either, the yeast do not 'eat sugar and poop alcohol', in actuality the yeast, after running out of oxygen in the air (or without access to air in the case of bottom fermenting yeast) 'breath' the exposed oxygen off of the sugar molecule, what's left behind is alcohol.
Anyone who's eaten manioc (also known as cassava) and sweet potatoes knows that they're plants with starchy tubers and that's where the similiarities end. Not knowing the difference could be deadly since much cassava is of the "bitter" variety and must be carefully prepared to remove dangerous levels of cyanide.
That's only true if there is no social consequences for selfishness. As long as the altruism comes with other things like ostracism, shunning, etc, for the individuals found to be selfish, the group can do a pretty good job at surviving. As long as you are more likely to thrive in the society by cooperating than you are to be a cheater with risks of being caught and outed, then it makes sense to cooperate.
I said "If it were an advantage to be selfish, rather than altruistic, the species would become more selfish". I didn't say it is an advantage. In essence, I agree with you here.
You are referring to sexual selection, which is often an opposing force to natural selection. Natural selection selects for adaptability, while sexual selection can select for any number of ridiculous things like peacock feathers. Sexual selection is kept in check by natural selection, as you need to survive in order to reproduce.
Here's where I disagree with you. Sexual selection _is_ natural selection. That's how natural selection works, there can be no other way. Reproductive success is the be all and end all of evolution. I'm not sure how you can argue that it's not.
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I said "If it were an advantage to be selfish, rather than altruistic, the species would become more selfish". I didn't say it is an advantage. In essence, I agree with you here.
It is an advantage if you are really good at it.
It is also an advantage to be able to spot cheaters, if you are a team player.
The survival of the species is sort of an arbitrary metric. In the same way that some species of parasites need their host species to survive, cheaters need their victims to survive as well. That doesn;t mean they are playing on the same team. It also doesn't mean that they are on completely different teams either.
Here's where I disagree with you. Sexual selection _is_ natural selection.
Sexual selection is natural selection in the sense that it is a type of selection and it is "natural" (i.e. part of nature), but the term "sexual selection" can refer to a type of selection that is distinct from "natural selection". This is in fact how Darwin treated it. Although many people treat sexual selection as a part of natural selection, this just means that we don;t have a good name for the "non-sexual" part of natural selection.
Reproductive success is the be all and end all of evolution. I'm not sure how you can argue that it's not.
Sexual selection goes much deeper than simple reproductive success. Other factors like fitness indicators, are actually detrimental in many ways to survival and therefore reproductive success. In fact fitness indicators are required to be detrimental for survival in order to be good fitness indicators, as in the example of the peacock's feathers.
In many species good at surviving is not enough. You need to have some ridiculous plumage or some other handicap to show you are *really* good at surviving. Only a really genetically fit peacock could survive with such a big handicap.
Sexual selection was actual the subject of one of Darwin's later books (later than "On the Origin of Species") "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex".
Sexual selection is natural selection in the sense that it is a type of selection and it is "natural" (i.e. part of nature), but the term "sexual selection" can refer to a type of selection that is distinct from "natural selection". This is in fact how Darwin treated it. Although many people treat sexual selection as a part of natural selection, this just means that we don;t have a good name for the "non-sexual" part of natural selection.
There is no "non-sexual" part of natural selection (at least in complex animals). Natural selection is entirely sexual selection.
I'm not sure where you are getting this from... Can you define how non-sexual natural selection might work?
Right, I don't get why researchers find altruism puzzling. So-called altruism benefits, if not just the group, the species as a whole. An example is when one person sacrifices themselves in a battle to save the others. Taking one for the team, as it were. Selfish behavior might bring everyone down with you, so I think the evolutionary advantage is quite clear. It's not always about the individual.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
And the other current hypothesis for the extinction of the Neanderthals is that they were bred out. There were more H.sap than H.nean and we could interbreed so they just became a minor part of the H.sap gene pool in Europe.