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I believe that social apathy is one of the main reasons why changes cannot easily be brought about in contemporary society due to the general lack of interest of the public, and this has ties with many mental diseases

But does the act of indifference and apathy actually has an evolutionary advantage and more curiously, do animals known how to demonstrate that in some manner?

A Google search on "evolutionary origins on apathy" returns no relevant hits other than the links to schzophrenia and other related neuropathies

Are there known studies on apathy and indifference in animals and their evolutionary origins?

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  • $\begingroup$ I have edited your post, partly to correct the English, and in particular the misuse of the word disinterest, which means lack of bias from having an interest (financial etc.) in something. I have also changed "We knew" (presumably meant as We know) to "I believe". I believe it is bad practice to make unsupported assertions of this sort, attributing them to others, rather than taking responsibility for them yourself. I personally neither know what you assert, nor do I believe it. $\endgroup$ – David Jun 10 '18 at 9:22
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    $\begingroup$ You need to ask the reverse question why would a species evolve to care about individuals not related to it, the only examples are reciprocal altruism which has so strict requirements. $\endgroup$ – John Jun 10 '18 at 13:41
  • $\begingroup$ one has to try to define "apathy" and thats tricky, but maybe you really are looking for "low altruism" where altruism is well explored in evolutionary theory. on other hand maybe you are overthinking this, what you are really describing is "survival of the fittest" which involves/ or is at core an individual-centric drive to compete/ survive ie "zero sum game". there seems to be some interspecies altruism where for example in africa, sometimes different animal species will occasionally assist each other evading predators. so there seems some tradeoff between altruism and survival-of-fittest. $\endgroup$ – vzn Jun 10 '18 at 17:01
  • $\begingroup$ While I'm really unsure as to what you mean by "social apathy". even a cursory observation of animals will show that they're apathetic about many things. (For instance, of my two dogs, one gets excited when I throw a tennis ball, the other could care less unless I throw it into water.) The parts about changes to contemporary society might be better addressed on the Politics site, though I must say that it's quite possible that large numbers of people like society the way it is better than they do your proposed changes :-) $\endgroup$ – jamesqf Jun 10 '18 at 18:35

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