Scientists Ask Why Humans are Nice. I Ask: Are Humans Nice?
Scientists insist humans are altruistic and cooperative and that this calls out for an explanation. Here's why.
Scientists Ask Why Humans are Nice. I Ask: Are Humans Nice?
This is my column for next week. It will also appear in the Health and Science section of Monday's Philadelphia Inquirer:
It’s nearly impossible to write objectively about the science of human kindness, cooperation, and altruism if you are, in fact, a human being. That’s especially true now that there’s a rift in the evolution community over two competing theories to explain why we’re nice or, in technical terms, eusocial.
Since the best way to deal with bias is disclosure, I’ll admit I’ve had more vicious hate mail than usual this week, and so when I hear the world eusocial, I think my part of the universe is mal-social. When the scientists talk about understanding why we’re nice, I say, “where?”
Biologist David Sloan Wilson, who is enmeshed in the scientific dispute over the evolution of niceness, says it’s understandable that our personal attitudes come into play. Those who value individualism may gravitate toward the theory of kin selection, which is favored by Richard Dawkins. Those who have a more communitarian attitude may be more open to an idea known as group selection, also called multilevel selection, which was recently championed by the equally prominent scientist-author E.O. Wilson.
Group selection, roughly, is the idea that Darwin’s theory can act on groups as well as individuals, and that genetic tendencies toward cooperation can proliferate when groups of people cooperating outcompete groups that are constantly hitting one another over the head with clubs and hogging all the food. Kin selection, on the other hand, equates kindness with benefiting relatives and others who share genes.
The dispute has festered for years, but last week things came to a head. In April E.O. Wilson released his latest book, The Social Conquest of Earth, in which he argued that our social nature is the key to humanity’s successful spread around the planet. He also makes the contentious claim that group, or multilevel, selection is the right way to explain our social roots, and kin selection is not.
Earlier this month the book got a scathing review from Dawkins, who is famous for his science popularization as well as his cutting wit: “Just as a child may enjoy addressing an envelope: Oxford, England, Europe, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Universe, so biologists with non-analytical minds warm to multilevel selection. …”
I asked Penn evolutionary psychologist Rob Kurzban to weigh in. He said we should all be careful not to see altruism where it doesn’t exist or try to invoke complicated explanations for it when ordinary natural selection does the job.
First of all, human altruists usually prosper. People who help others gain allies, which benefits them, or they improve their reputations. People who act selfishly are punished with public shame — think of the captain who abandoned his sinking cruise ship off the Italian coast. Experiments show that people are much less altruistic when they think nobody is looking, Kurzban said. We should, in other words, be realistic about just how nice we really are.
Being nice himself, Kurzban pointed me to the ongoing discussion on the evolutionary psychology Facebook page, where attention had focused on a piece by David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology at Binghamton University who is a known champion of group selection.
His piece, called “Richard Dawkins, Edward O. Wilson, and the Consensus of the Many,” ran on his website, called “This View of Life.” He wrote that both kin selection and multilevel selection can be useful for describing human behavior. “The many,” in his opinion, refers to the bulk of the biology community. He claims the many take a middle ground and accept the usefulness of both theories, though at the end he adds the disclaimer that the many are invited to disagree.
So I called Sloan Wilson to get him to explain how two seemingly different ideas could be compatible. “It’s like looking at a mountain from the east and the west,” he said. Both views give you information.
I wanted him to explain how kin selection worked on non-kin and whether this has anything to do with the fact that we humans are more than 99 percent genetically identical to one another. Sloan Wilson said the relatedness used in kin-selection theory is based on how much more related two individuals are than two random individuals would be. Siblings are more closely related than cousins, for example.
And yet, he said, kin selection has been expanded into a theory called inclusive fitness, which can act on non-relatives. Imagine, he said, that we both shared a gene for being nice. Even if we’re not related, we might help each other get food, or get out of trouble, because we share this gene. Our cooperation helps the niceness gene propagate itself. It all fits nicely with the selfish-gene concept popularized by Dawkins: Selfish genes can make us nice, and in doing so, they help themselves.
But what about the fact that many altruists are acting in their self-interest?
While ordinary natural selection may explain how such people survive now, it’s harder to explain how altruistic groups arise in the first place, or how our ancestors evolved from more selfish animals to us, Sloan Wilson said. Now that we’re surrounded by other altruists, being nice pays off.
Group selection, he emphasized, is not the idea that traits evolve for the good of the species. It’s often confused with that, he said, but group selection can take place among much smaller groups. The important point is that it can influence the course of evolution if traits that are disadvantageous for individuals within groups can nevertheless propagate because they cluster in groups that outcompete other groups.
In the early 20th century, the idea of group selection was accepted uncritically, and then rejected with force in the 1960s, he said. The situation was reminiscent of the way Darwinian evolution killed off its predecessor, known as Lamarckian evolution. In reality, Darwin accepted some of the wrong concepts attributed to Lamarck. And Lamarck’s evolution was a huge leap over the creationist dogma of his time. But ever since Darwin, “it’s been portrayed as stupid.”
Ideas rejected in this way are made taboo, Sloan Wilson said. “All [that] students learn about group selection is you never dare invoke that.” Unless, that is, you are a double Pulitzer Prize-winning writer like E.O. Wilson.
As for Wilson’s new book, “the stuff [from critics] about kin selection is a big distraction,” Sloan Wilson said. He recommends that people concentrate on the more central point, which is about the consequences of human social behavior. “It accounts for our worldwide domination,” he said, “which is not necessarily a good thing.”
Despite a stormy week in which I briefly thought the only being I could trust was my cat, everyone who was interviewed for this story was very cooperative, even altruistic. So maybe humans are not so bad after all.
Contact Faye Flam at 215-854-4977, fflam@phillynews.com; @fayeflam on Twitter.
Hopefully Faye's editors will let this column run for a good while longer. It is very rare to find a good science column; Philadelphians are lucky in this regard. Sad to think that so many have nothing better to do than send hate mail to another human being.— anaxyrus- This article is full of muddled thinking. The majority of primitive tribes such as have been described by anthropologists raise children communally--that is, the primary unit of the community is not a nuclear family such as has evolved in Western society but one characterized by shared responsibilities across DNA lines. It should also be remembered that our DNA does not alone determine our phenotypes; the configuration of histones changes gene expression according to exogenous and endogennon-kinship tribes mutually influence each others' phenotypes, just as they contribute to each others' Darwinian survival odds. Conversely, groups that raise children in nuclear families to the exclusion of all other influences--rare indeed but for Robinson Crusoe--could plausibly be explained by the theory of kinship selection. but given the social nature of man and the prolongation of his life span as he has developed increasingly sophisticated ways of sharing items useful to his survival (such as the information in this virtual edition of a newspaper that not so long ago was available only within a fifteen mile radius of Philadelphia's City Hall), Dr. Wilson's theory of group or multilevel selection is more persuasive, particularly since it subsumes the theory of kinship selection by allowing nuclear families to be defined as smaller "groups".— forsythe
- Let's try this again. The comment above was garbled by a "virtual secretary".
This article is full of muddled thinking. The majority of primitive tribes such as have been described by anthropologists raise children communally--that is, the primary unit of the community is not a nuclear family such as has evolved in Western society but one characterized by shared responsibilities across DNA lines. It should also be remembered that our DNA does not alone determine our phenotypes; the configuration of histones changes gene expression according to exogenous and endogenous variables, allowing members of non-kinship tribes to mutually influence each others' phenotypes, just as they contribute to each others' Darwinian survival odds. Conversely, groups that raise children in nuclear families to the exclusion of all other influences--rare indeed but for Robinson Crusoe--could plausibly be explained by the theory of kinship selection. but given the social nature of man and the prolongation of his life span as he has developed increasingly sophisticated ways of sharing items useful to his survival (such as the information in this virtual edition of a newspaper that not so long ago was available only within a fifteen mile radius of Philadelphia's City Hall), Dr. Wilson's theory of group or multilevel selection is more persuasive, particularly since it subsumes the theory of kinship selection by allowing nuclear families to be defined as smaller "groups".— forsythe - The thinking in the article is not so muddled as you might think. First, we must consider altruism as behavior that substantially harms individual fitness; little nice things we do for one another daily and monetary donations by rich benefactors are not altruism biologically. But the answer to Faye Flam's question is yes; all childless couples (including adoptive parents of strangers' babies) are altruistic. We also need to recall that kin selection does not just mean sibling or first cousin selection. Perhaps the power of kin selection is easier to follow if thought of as "inclusive fitness;" see the 9th paragraph from the bottom "And yet, he said, kin selection..." Kin selection (inclusive fitness) does not require a nuclear family structure or even nurturing by biological parents in order to work. Inclusive fitness, for example, explains why sterile castes of honeybees raise young that are not their own offspring. These offspring nevertheless are relatives and share large numbers of genes. It also helps to remember that we are all related, coming from common ancestry just a geological eye blink ago. Further, while family structure varies in pre-agricultural societies and, as you note, the Western nuclear family is not observed, typically children are raised within tribal villages that are extended families; these villages are not cobbled together through Survivor audition tapes. To avoid inbreeding depression, females (or more rarely males) upon adulthood are sent to other villages. "It takes a village," but the village consists of extended kinship. Children are not typically sent off to neighboring villages rarely if ever to see their parents again. (ctd.)— anaxyrus
- David Sloan Wilson is indeed trying to subsume kin selection within group selection in his ideas on multilevel selection. But he can't logically do it. These ideas are in fundamental conflict. Inclusive fitness involves natural selection of "good genes," genes that tend to spread because altruistic acts benefit others who possess the gene. Group selection involves a higher level selection of groups where many have "bad genes," genes that reduce the fitness of all who possess them and tend to decline within populations. DSW takes pains to distinguish his ideas from "naive group selection," but a quote from one of his papers makes it clear that MLS is group selection. DSW: "if there are many groups in the total population that vary in the frequency of altruists, the most altruistic groups will differentially contribute to the total gene pool." But, starting with an individual, how did fitness-reducing genes get to a high frequency within any of the populations? It had to be through genetic drift. Unless the population is very small and suffering inbreeding depression, this harmful effect must be very minor. Again the margin for group selection is thin, the benefit to the group has to be large with respect to the minor harm of the gene, which causes us to ask if the harm is great enough to call its effect altruism.— anaxyrus
- All of the above refers only to biological evolution. DSW also studies cultural evolution, where group selection can work like a charm. Traits of groups (including suicide bombing which perhaps perversely is altruistic) can spread very rapidly through teaching. Culturally taught traits can then go on to affect human evolution through drift (some religions place a value on large families so their adherents get oversampled) but that hardly explains the evolutionary origins of altruism.— anaxyrus
- "So I called Sloan Wilson on Skype ... ."
And then I quit reading. Either the author doesn't know a irrelevancy when it smacks her in the face - meaning the whole of this article is suspect - or this is a useless commercial plug - which also makes the article suspect.
Too bad. It seemed interesting until I realized I couldn't trust a word of it.— pll215 - Arguments over human altruism go back a long time - see my own piece at http://www.thetwentyfirstfloor.com/?p=3770.
One point worth making; a society of nice people is only stable if the nice people are willing to punish those who don't do their share, including those who don't do their share of the difficult and dangerous job of punishing. This may help explain why some very nasty political attitudes are so deep-seated.— PaulBraterman - First, I enjoy reading your articles. I look forward to Monday's edition of the Inquirer because of the science section and your stories.
Second, I got halfway through Dawkin's book "The Selfish Gene" and put it down. I am not saying he is wrong but it seemed as though he used every animal and insect to try to back his theory. I just got exhausted by it and it seemed a bit far fetched at times. But I am not educated enough to say yea or nay to his theory or the others you wrote about. I have an assoc. degree in liberal arts and I took one class in physical anthropology. The only thing I'd point out is that you don't have a species if you don't have a population. The only way to have a population is to not kill all the others of your own species. So you would think that in some way we would have evolved to help each other so that we could flourish.
I am glad you attribute your sources so that I can look into anything that I may question. You are a good journalist. I took one class in journalism too. Good honest journalism is hard work. Thanks.— normd
In pursuit of her stories, writer Faye Flam has weathered storms in Greenland, gotten frost nip at the South Pole, and floated weightless aboard NASA’s zero-g plane. She has a degree in geophysics from the California Institute of Technology and started her writing career with the Economist. She later took on the particle physics and cosmology beat at Science Magazine before coming to the Inquirer in 1995. Her previous science column, “Carnal Knowledge,” ran from 2005 to 2008. Her new column and blog, Planet of the Apes, explores the topic of evolution and runs here and in the Inquirer’s health section each Monday. Email Faye at fflam@phillynews.com.
Reach Planet of the at fflam@phillynews.com.
