Parasites and altruism: converging roads.

Competitive environments sustain costly altruism with negligible assortment of interactions

Competition hinders the evolution of altruism amongst kin when beneficiaries gain at the expense of competing relatives. Altruism is consequently deemed to require stronger kin selection, or trait-selected synergies, or elastic population regulation, to counter this effect. Here we contest the view that competition puts any such demands on altruism. In ecologically realistic scenarios, competit...

On the Existence and Characterization of Markovian Equilib- rium in Models with Simple Non-Paternalistic Altruism

This paper provides sufficient conditions for existence of Markovian equilibrium in models with non-paternalistic altruism extending to one generation ahead. When utility is non-separable, we show that each equilibrium savings policy correspondence is increasing everywhere and single-valued, except perhaps on a countable number of points. It is also upper hemi-continuous where it is single valu...

Manipulated into giving: when parasitism drives apparent or incidental altruism.

Altruistic acts involve the actor donating fitness to beneficiaries at net cost to itself. In contrast, parasitic acts involve the actor extracting benefit from others at net cost to the donors. Both behaviours may have the same direct net-cost transferral of fitness from donor to beneficiary; the key difference between parasitism and altruism is thus who drives the interaction. Identifying the...

A Study on the Altruistic Attitude among the Youth in Mashhad

The aim of this research is to study altruism among the youth and is applied by the method of grounded theory. The focus of study is on exploring the social process which shapes altruism. The data were gathered through in-depth interviews 10 youth who lived in Mashhad. The results of the study highlight the complexity and variety of the youth experiences altruism that is a process reflects inte...

on the dilemma of moraliti:self-interest and altruism