It is hard to imagine that anyone thinks of goodness as a problem, but evolution pioneer Charles Darwin did. The little worker bees that sacrificed themselves to protect their hives -- the ultimate example of animal goodness -- kept Darwin up at night.
If Darwin's ideas about evolution and natural selection were correct -- and, of course, they are -- then this sort of altruism should be extraordinarily rare in nature. If increased reproduction is the ultimate end all and be all of evolution by natural selection, then altruists should disappear -- and fast.
But they don't disappear, and Darwin was so puzzled by this that he spoke of altruism as a problem that could prove fatal to his whole theory of evolution.
Then a solution to this nasty conundrum hit Darwin like a ton of bricks. Worker bees weren't helping just any old bunch of bees, they were protecting their hive. And their hive contained special individuals: blood relatives.
Blood relatives are, by definition, very similar to one another. So even though the little worker bees may have been giving up their lives, by doing so they were potentially saving hundreds of blood relatives. In modern parlance, we'd say that the worker bees were helping blood kin, because blood kin are genetically related. By helping your blood relatives, you are indirectly promoting the reproduction of copies of your own genes -- copies that just happen to reside inside your kin.
Darwin wasn't the only scientist who was fascinated with the question of the evolution of goodness. His good friend and colleague, Thomas Henry Huxley, was as well. Huxley got himself into a heated argument over whether blood kinship could or could not explain altruism.
Huxley's opponent was Prince Peter Kropotkin, ex-page to the Czar of Russia, naturalist and arguably the most famous anarchist of the 19th century. Huxley argued that all goodness could be traced to blood kinship, while Kropotkin argued that goodness and blood kinship were completely divorced from one another.
Neither was right, as it turned out, but it would take almost a hundred years before a shy, reserved and brilliant British biologist named William Hamilton would settle all the arguments about blood kinship and altruism by coming up with a simple, but elegant mathematical equation.
Instead of asking whether blood kinship is the single factor explaining altruism, Hamilton approached the question from a different perspective. He began by defining three terms: the genetic relatedness between individuals (labeled r), the cost of an act of goodness (c), and the benefit that a recipient obtained when someone was nice to him or her (b). Using some beautiful mathematics, in the early 1960s Hamilton discovered that altruism and blood kinship are not linked by an all-or-nothing relationship.
Instead, what is now known as "Hamilton's Rule" states that altruism evolves whenever r times b is greater than c. In other words, if enough relatives receive benefits from altruism to outweigh the cost of altruism, then altruism spreads; otherwise, it does not.
Phrased in the cold language of natural selection, blood relatives are worth helping in direct proportion to their genetic (blood) relatedness, weighted by how great a benefit they received.
Literally thousands of experiments with both nonhumans and humans show the power of Hamilton's Rule. This little equation is evolutionary biology's version of E = mc2.
Over and over, we see that an analysis of the costs and benefits of altruism, along with the genetic relatedness of interactants, allows us to predict the presence or absence of altruism.
Hamilton's Rule, of course, does not explain all altruism. Another large chunk of goodness falls under the category of "reciprocity." Individuals are sometimes willing to be altruistic to someone now in the expectation that they will, in turn, be helped when we they need it.
Evolutionary biologists have been almost as interested in this type of altruism, as they have been in kinship-based altruism. Amazingly enough, it was Hamilton, along with the political scientist Robert Axelrod and the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, who formalized the models behind the evolution of reciprocity.
Following up on work done by Trivers in the early 1970s, in 1981, Axelrod and Hamilton used the mathematics of game theory to predict when so-called "reciprocal altruism" should evolve. Again, scores of empirical studies have followed up the model.
Reciprocity can be complex, but an evolutionary perspective has cleared the path to understanding, just the same way it did in the case of blood kinship and altruism.
If goodness is a problem, then the answer -- or at the least part of the answer -- can be found in evolutionary biology.
Lee Alan Dugatkin is a professor of biology and distinguished university academic in the biology department at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
On March 22, 2023, at the close of their meeting in Moscow, media microphones were allowed to record Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) telling Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin, “Right now there are changes — the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years — and we are the ones driving these changes together.” Widely read as Xi’s oath to create a China-Russia-dominated world order, it can be considered a high point for the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea (CRINK) informal alliance, which also included the dictatorships of Venezuela and Cuba. China enables and assists Russia’s war against Ukraine and North Korea’s
After thousands of Taiwanese fans poured into the Tokyo Dome to cheer for Taiwan’s national team in the World Baseball Classic’s (WBC) Pool C games, an image of food and drink waste left at the stadium said to have been left by Taiwanese fans began spreading on social media. The image sparked wide debate, only later to be revealed as an artificially generated image. The image caption claimed that “Taiwanese left trash everywhere after watching the game in Tokyo Dome,” and said that one of the “three bad habits” of Taiwanese is littering. However, a reporter from a Japanese media outlet
Taiwanese pragmatism has long been praised when it comes to addressing Chinese attempts to erase Taiwan from the international stage. “Taipei” and the even more inaccurate and degrading “Chinese Taipei,” imposed titles required to participate in international events, are loathed by Taiwanese. That is why there was huge applause in Taiwan when Japanese public broadcaster NHK referred to the Taiwanese Olympic team as “Taiwan,” instead of “Chinese Taipei” during the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics. What is standard protocol for most nations — calling a national team by the name their country is commonly known by — is impossible for
India is not China, and many of its residents fear it never will be. It is hard to imagine a future in which the subcontinent’s manufacturing dominates the world, its foreign investment shapes nations’ destinies, and the challenge of its economic system forces the West to reshape its own policies and principles. However, that is, apparently, what the US administration fears. Speaking in New Delhi last week, US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau warned that “we will not make the same mistakes with India that we did with China 20 years ago.” Although he claimed the recently agreed framework
RSS