There are at least two kinds of altruism. Psychological altruism means acting out of concern for the well-being of others, without regard to your own self-interest. Biological altruism refers to behavior that helps the survival of a species without benefiting the particular individual who’s being altruistic. It may not be obvious what exactly these two forms of altruism have to do with each other and why they should be discussed in the same breath.

You could think that the two come together in certain theories about human nature. Some say that humans are by nature selfish. But evolutionary biology and psychology are beginning to challenge this idea. It turns out that evolution has actually hard-wired altruistic behavior into many animals -- including human beings. Thus the facts of biological altruism might be thought to show the error of those who think that humans are psychologically egoistic.

But to think that way would put you in danger of mixing “is” and “ought.” Biological altruism may have nothing to do with morality. Even if some animals have evolved to be altruistic, that doesn’t automatically make itmorallyright. Biological altruism isn’t a challenge to psychological egoism, but to what used to be called the selfish gene hypothesis. That’s the hypothesis that genes are solely in the business of replicating themselves and that an animal is basically the tool of its genes. Genes make animals behave so those very genes get reproduced as often as possible in subsequent generations.

诚然，这是自私这个词的特殊用法。基因并没有自我。所以他们不可能有自己的利益。这就是为什么生物利他主义不同于心理利他主义，与道德无关。理查德•道金斯(Richard Dawkins)创造了“自私基因”(自私基因)一词作为比喻。He was just trying to say that genes actas ifthey are totally self-centered.

当然，这也引出了一个有趣的问题:既然基因在隐喻意义上是如此自私，那么生物学上的利他主义就会发生。这和心理利他主义是如何发生的不是同一个问题，但这本身就是一个有趣的问题。事实证明，许多生物的行为方式不利于它们自身的生存机会，但有利于其他生物的繁殖机会。例如，一只长尾猴会发出警报，提醒其他猴子有捕食者的存在，尽管这样会引起其他猴子的注意，增加自己被攻击和死亡的几率。

This isn’t quite the same as saying that genes are metaphorically selfless rather than metaphorically selfish. The point is rather that selection may not operate on individual genes at all, but on whole groups or populations. A group that contains some altruists will survive betteras a groupthan a group that contains no altruists. Evolution, it turns out, can work on whole groups as a unit. That’s called group selection. That’s a still controversial thought, but one that seems to be gaining wider acceptance.

但让我们至少简单地回到心理利他主义。也许有一种方法可以把生物学上的利他主义和心理学上的利他主义联系在一起，特别是如果我们认为人类的心理至少在一定程度上是由自然选择设计的，特别是如果我们认为人类的集体心理。把一个人类集体想象成一个国家。我们不必都愿意为国家而死。但也许我们中的一些人最好是。如果我们中的一些人是这样，我们所有人都会过得更好——尽管那些愿意去死的人个体的情况可能会更糟。我并不是说国家是由群体的自然选择直接决定的。但我想说的是，也许像群体选择过程这样的东西，通过保证人类集体中有足够多的心理利他主义者来提高群体繁殖成功的机会，已经塑造了人类心理，形成了至少一定程度的心理利他主义。

In hypothesizing that to some extent human psychological altruism may be a consequence of biological altruism, I do not mean at all to suggest that people blindly do what their genes tell them to do. People act on their beliefs, desires, hopes and fears, on their conceptions of right and wrong. But in the end people are just biological organisms. The human brain is just another organ. It’s highly likely that even our conceptions of right and wrong are a product of evolutionary forces. So it wouldn’t

be altogether surprising to find a tendency toward altruistic thinking wired into our very neurons by something like the mechanism of group selection. Would it? That’s the question we put to our guest, Jeffrey Schloss, who is an expert on both biological and psychological altruism.