The Altruism Puzzle

Last Sunday’s New York Times magazine was devoted to illuminating altruism in its many contemporary forms. All the evidence presented in the Times’ articles supported the conclusion that the charitable spirit is still alive and well in our self-absorbed, greed-besotted society. Our deeper, more caring instincts have not been extinguished by our acquisitive culture.

And yet, in evolutionary terms human altruism remains a puzzle. In our willingness to sacrifice sometimes even our lives for our fellows, we resemble army ants, honey bees and a small number of other communal living species. How come?

In the lead-in article for the Times’ special issue, writer Jim Holt pondered this question and trotted out the reasoning of modern evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately, mainstream evolutionary psychologists are still dogmatically devoted to neo-Darwinism and the “selfish gene” paradigm, so their proposed explanation for human altruism is constricted and unconvincing. Neo-Darwinists recognize only sacrifices for close relatives (“kin selection”) and tit-for-tat reciprocities (“reciprocal altruism”), and maybe some social concern for one’s reputation and standing in the community. How the latter trait evolved is unclear and none of these supposed “mechanisms” can account for the soldiers who volunteer to die for their country or, for that matter, the suicide bombers who sacrifice their lives to kill “infidels.”

What’s missing from the evolutionary psychologists’ conventional wisdom is a perfectly logical explanation that is still taboo in some quarters – group selection. The reason is that evolutionary theorists have traditionally viewed the group selection hypothesis in a very restrictive way, so that it appears on its face to be very unlikely.

Without venturing too far into this theoretical thicket, suffice it to say that, for the most part, the issue of group selection has been debated without reference to the likely context in which humankind evolved. The accumulating evidence suggests that our ancestors evolved over several million years in small, closely cooperating groups of both kin and non-kin that formed interdependent “survival units.” They mostly inhabited highly dangerous and changeable environments where they were often in direct competition not only with other groups of their own kind but with an array of other group-living, pack-hunting predators – wild dogs, hyenas, lions and many others that are now extinct. So our ancestral hominid groups were not just abstract “gene pools” but multi-purpose survival units – “superorganisms” in the sociobiologists’ parlance. They collaborated most importantly in group defense against various threats, as well as in foraging, migrations, and in other ways, and the genes they were protecting and promoting were their own and those of their offspring, as well as close kin and some non-kin. Sacrifices for the good of the group could directly improve an altruist's fitness, because his/her offspring depended on the group. And the groups that were the most effective in promoting the interests of their groups (and minimizing cheating and “free-riders”) were differentially “selected”, as Darwin himself proposed in The Descent of Man.

An analogy can be found in each of our ten trillion or so cells. We now know that modern, eukaryotic (nucleated) cells are the product of a partnership that was formed between ancient bacterial ancestors of our mitochondria (the “energy factories” in each of our cells) and early one-celled protists. Over time, the partners became completely interdependent. They have a “shared fate.” And so, ultimately, do we and our progeny.

Thought for the day: There’s a good reason why, as the old saying goes, “it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.” It’s not a matter of charity but a recognition that we depend on that wheel.