>It's a silly idea, but just a shower thought I've been mulling over.
I can't answer your questions, but I can add some more food for thought to think about...consider the impact of ones microbiome in turning genes like this on/off. So you may have the "selfless gene" as you call it, but by default it is turned off, so you don't warn your own of the predator, now same exact hypthetical, but it just so happens you ate something that introduced new viruses/bacteria into your microbiome, which happened to change your gene expression and turn on the selfless gene causing "you" to warn your kind of the threat. Did you really warn them, or since the gene was only turned on by your particular microbiome at the time, are you just a host being controlled by trillions of bacteria and viruses?
I can't answer your questions, but I can add some more food for thought to think about...consider the impact of ones microbiome in turning genes like this on/off. So you may have the "selfless gene" as you call it, but by default it is turned off, so you don't warn your own of the predator, now same exact hypthetical, but it just so happens you ate something that introduced new viruses/bacteria into your microbiome, which happened to change your gene expression and turn on the selfless gene causing "you" to warn your kind of the threat. Did you really warn them, or since the gene was only turned on by your particular microbiome at the time, are you just a host being controlled by trillions of bacteria and viruses?