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Comment by mihaic | Hacker News Reader

Human evolution actually escaped the trap of this short term thinking twice: first some 100k years ago, when altruism bloomed (see E O Wilson), and some 2500 years ago with the universal moralistic religions.

The group that maximizes their long-term reproduction is the one that inherits the earth.

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That's the malthusian fallacy. The winners are the ones that maximize survival. Reproduction is what all the shills did anyway

It is not short-term thinking. It is how we all think on a daily basis, even unconsciously, because it maximizes survival and reproduction, at least on evolutionary scales.

> The group that maximizes their long-term reproduction is the one that inherits the earth.

Yes, that's an interesting paradox in a world where the poorer tend to have more (surviving) children that the richer. But it emerged only very recently on evolutionary scales.

Before it meant the group that even sometimes risked their life for the children of everyone in the tribe. I think you're discounting natural human altruism, which is well studied.

The tribe was bound by blood and reciprocal ties. This works at small scales, which is the context we evolved in.

This is why in a village where everyone knows each other people help each other but in a holiday resort locals screw tourists.

Religions like Christianity are the natural development at global scale for that. We're losing that scaling in altruism now, but it doesn't have to be this way.

On a longer time scale, the poor having more children than the rich is a minor temporary aberration. Their fertility is going the same direction, just with a bit of a lag.

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