Comments on article in Jan 2002 issue of Scientific American on “The economics of fair play.” 

This article sounds rather uninteresting and not even related to physical science, but in fact it is very powerful evidence for the inherent altruism of mankind and speaks against selfish gene evolution theory as implying that mankind is inherently selfish. 

The article is about what is called game theory.  Game theory is essentially about how people will react in various situations where they only have choices in which they must give up something and decide to what degree to trust the good instincts on another human.  Such situations have names such as the “prisoners dilemma”.  The article is about experiments run with people in such dilemmas where they are put in difficult situations with money (economics) at stake.   What was discovered is that people will put the general "good" above their own gain, especially if they believe another is not being fair or reasonable.

These recent studies (using real people and not computer models) have found the people do not behave as would be expected form a selfish survival evolutionary theory.   In one experiment in what is called the ultimate game, the players behave as though fairness is more important than pure/simple selfishness.   It is not as though selfishness does not exist, it is just that at some level, people will take fairness above economic/physical gain. 

In another game where there is a penalty for selfish behavior, it is found that people are even willing to take a personal loss to punish such selfish behavior.  The article authors look at this as though it means that people get a pleasure from such punishment (which is a nearsighted materialistic viewpoint) and they miss the fact that people probably instead actually place a high value on justice. 

The writers are clearly materialistic/reductionistic in their thinking and cannot even see and barely mention “fairness” and do not mention “justice” at all.   They do see that the findings are at odds with Darwinian theory and say, “Ultimately, moral guidelines determine an essential part of economic life.  How could such forms of social behavior evolve?  This is a central question for Darwinian theory.”   They should have said that this is just one of the numerous findings that contradict pure Darwinian theory.  (At least they called Darwinism a theory (which is all it is above the micro level) and not a law or such.)

Near the end of the article the authors do admit, “in social interactions our preferences often turn out to be far from selfish.” 

When materialist people make statements “people only commit unselfish acts because it either makes them feel good or they will feel guilty if the don’t, they miss completely the very real possibility that such acts are often done because people are doing what they intuitively know is “right”.  

The experiments in the article seem to show that such a sense of what it  “right” does in fact have a value to people.  Clearly there is something more and far above “selfish genes” at work in almost the all of us.

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