Table Of ContentI I
H I
RICHARD U ALEXANDER
PITMAN PuBusrnNG LIMITED
London
DARWINISM AND HUMAN AFFAIRS
I
Firstpublished in Great Britainin ig8o by Pitman Publishing limited,
39 Parker Street, London WCiB 5PB
Copyright © 1979 by the University of Washington Press
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
includingphotocopy, recording, or anyinformation storage orretrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Alexander, Richard D
Darwinism and human affairs.
(The Jessie and John Danz lectures)
Bibliography: p.
1. Social evolution. 2. Evolution.
3. Natural selection. I. Title. II Series.
HM1oO.A44 301‘.0424 75—65829
ISBN 0 273 08477 1
This book is dedicated to the great teachers
in my life, especia Donald 1. Borror,
Theodore H. Hubbell, Ernest M. R. Lamkey,
Blanche McAvoy, Donald R. Meyer, Edward
S. Thomas, John N. Wolfe, and, most
of all, my parents, Archie Dale Alexander
and Katharine Elizabeth Heath.
The Jessie and John Danz Lectures
In October 1961, Mr. John Danz, a Seattle pioneer, andhis wife,
Jessie Danz, made a substantial gift to the University of Washtobe
ington to establish a perpetual fund to provide income
used to bring to the University of Washington each year “dis—
tinguished scholars of national and international reputation
who have concerned themselves with the impact of science and
philosophy on man’s perception of arational universe.”The
fund established by Mr. and Mrs Danz is now known as the
Jessie and John Danz Fund, and the scholars brought to the
University under its provisions are known as Jessie and John
Danz Lecturers or Professors.
Mr. Danz wisely left to the Board of Regents of the University
of Washington the identification of the special fields in
science, philosophy, and other disciplines in which lectureships
may be established. His major concern and interest were that
the fund would enable the University of Washington to bring
to the campus some of the truly great scholars and thinkers of
the world.
Mr. Danz authorized the Regents to expend a portion of the
income from the fund to purchase special collections of books,
documents, and other scholarly materials needed to reinforce
the effectiveness of the extraordinary lectureships and profes-.
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viii Darwinism and Human Affairs
sorships. The terms of the gift also provided for the publication
and dissemination, when this seems appropriate, of the lectures
given by the Jessie and John Danz Lecturers.
Through this book, therefore, another Jessie and John Danz
Lecturer speaks to the pep1e arid scholars of the world, as he
has spoken to his audiences at the University of Washington
and in the Pacific Northwest community.
It falls to a journalist reviewing the books of our day to treat
the dreadful almost as though it were commonplace The books
I review, week upon week, report the destruction of the land or
the air; they detail the perversion ofjustice; they reveal national
stupidities. None of them not one—hassaddened me and
shamed me as this book has. Because the experience of reading
it has made me realize for once and all thatwe really don’tknow
who we are, or where we came from, or what we have done, or
why.
Geoffrey Wolff, Newsweek (from a review
of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee)
ix
Preface
My purpose, in the lectures from which this book was developed,
was to review and extend our understanding of the relationship
between the process of organic evolution and the
structure, variations, and significance of human behavior. I
wished to show that a thorough understanding of the evolutionary
processes by which life has formed and diversified is a
vital part of the everyday knowledge of ordinary human beings
in a society such as ours that is to say, those who vote in a
democracy, those who help guide soda!, cultural, and technological
change, those who influence the lives of other human
beings, and those who reflect upon their own existences and
strive consciously to become the masters of their own fates. I
emphasized what I see as the philosophical significance of evolution
because it is defensible as the only theoretical base from
which to undertake a truly comprehensive analysis of human
activities and tendencies. I also sought to diminish the reasons
for the existing hostilities and strife that derive, as I see it, from
miscommunications and unnecessary disagreements between
biological and social scientists, and between biologists and hu
manists, in regard to evolution and its ideological and ethical
meanings.
Within the past two decades, refinements of evolutionary
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xii Preface
theory have created a major revolution in biology and produced
an entirely new view of human nature. I think it is worthwhile
to state briefly what happened to cause this revolution, and to
explain the reasons for its philoophica1 impact.
The notion of genes as heritable factors or units that recombine
during sexual reproduction and, together with the envithrough
ronment, shape the organism’sbehavioral, physiological, and
structural traits dates almost but not quite to Darwin,
the work of the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel. As a
formal concept integrated into biology, this view of genes is
only about as old as the twentieth century, although still a half
century older than the knowledge that the genetic material is
comprised of deoxyribonucleic acid molecules The evolution-
ist’sview ofthe genes as recombining units is also a half century
older than the efforts of molecular biologists to begin defining
genes directly from knowledge of their physiological activities
or effects.
Not until the l9óos did social biologists realize how important
it is for them to understand that what natural selection has
apparen been maximizing is the survival by reproduction of the
genes, as they have been defined by evolutionists, and that this
includes effects on the copies of genes, even when those copies
are located in other individuals In other words selection has
. ,
not operated so as to promote directly either the long-term
survival of individuals or the well-being and survival of populations
or species at the expense of individuals. When such
effects occur whether as a result of social interactions or for
other reasons they are either incidental consequences of the
evolutionary procesS or they arise out of such consequences.
In one stroke this realization provided the means for solving
numerous long-standing biological problems involving sexual
ity, senescence, sex ratios, male-female interactions, parental
care and nepotism Perhaps most importantly, it resolved the
ancient philosophical paradox whether humans are really
selfish individualists or group altruists, and provided, I believe
I
the first simple, general theory of human nature with a hi
likelihood of widespread acceptance. The answer to the age-old
Preface xlii
riddle that even ordinary humans ask themselves appears to be
that we are selfish individualists in the sense and to the extent
that this maximizes the survival by reproduction of the genes
in our own bodies, and we are group altruists in the
sense and to the extent that this maximizes the survival by
reproduction of the copies of our genes residing in the bodies
of others—thaist, in the bodies of our genetic relatives, both
descendant and nondescendant. At least this is what we have
evidently evolved to be, in the usual environments of history,
notwithstanding (i) the difficulties of determining what it
means that our environments have surely been altered by culture
and technology far too rapidly for our evolved phenotypes
(or developmental potentials) to “trackt”hem adaptively and
(2) our inability to know what the new knowledge about our
nature and our history may enable us to become.
Human behavior is exceedingly complex and diverse. It follows
that if an appropriate and reasonable theory of human
nature can be stated simply, it surely will be exceedingly difficult
to apply. This is obviously true with the new theory from
evolutionary biology. So long as human behavior and the capacity
to generate, absorb, use, and maintain culture were seen
as evolved to contribute to the well-being of the social group,
population, or species as a whole, confficts of interest were
relatively simple: by definition they should exist only as accifunction
dents or mistakes below the level at which was being
ascribed. The new theory, however, drives the problem of une
derstan conflicts of interest right to th level of the gene.
This means that, on evolutionary grounds, individual humans
are expected to behave as though they have individualized sets
of interests because they have individualized sets of genes. The
degrees of difference in their interests and therefore their ten-
dencies to cooperate and tobe altruistic toward one another
cannow be quantified. We expect them to correlate, inthe usual
environments of history, with degrees of genetic relatedness, or
the general likelihood that any gene is shared between them.
The major seeming exception is that means have developed for
enforcing reciprocity, or payment in systems of exchange, causresiding
