The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness

163 Pages·2006·1.3 MB·English

by  Lee Alan Dugatkin

The Altruism Equation
The Altruism Equation
SEVEN SCIENTISTS SEARCH FOR
THE ORIGINS OF GOODNESS
L A D
EE LAN UGATKIN
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire
OX20 1SY
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dugatkin, Lee Alan, 1962–
The altruism equation : seven scientists search for the origins of
goodness / Lee Alan Dugatkin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12590-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-691-12590-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Altruistic behavior in animals. 2. Altruism. I. Title.
QL775.5.D84 2006
591.56—dc22 2006005400
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Palatino
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
pup.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF
MY BELOVED FATHER, HARRY DUGATKIN (1918–2004),
WHO TAUGHT ME THAT
FAMILY ALWAYS COMES FIRST
Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

CHAPTER ONE
A Special Difficulty That Might Prove Fatal
CHAPTER TWO
Darwin’s Bulldog versus the Prince of Evolution
CHAPTER THREE
The Greatest Word from Science since Darwin
CHAPTER FOUR
J.B.S.: The Last Man Who Might Know All There Was to Be Known
CHAPTER FIVE
Hamilton’s Rule
CHAPTER SIX
The Price of Kinship
CHAPTER SEVEN
Spreading the Word
CHAPTER EIGHT
Keepers of the Flame
CHAPTER NINE
Curator of Mathematical Models
Notes
Index
Preface

F
OR MORE THAN a hundred years, a fierce debate raged within the scientific
community on the importance of blood kinship in shaping altruism in everything
from animals to humans. This debate, which began in 1859, was extremely
contentious, because whoever was right was going to control our view of the
origins of goodness. The reason is simple—at its heart, altruism is about
incurring a personal cost in order to help others, and that is close to what most of
us mean when we speak of doing good. So in essence, a theory on altruism is a
theory on goodness.
The debate on altruism and kinship would raise to the surface a number of
related questions: was nature red in tooth and claw, or a cooperative paradise?
And whatever the answer, was there really a biological theory that could explain
this? Before the fighting came to an end, politics, philosophy, mental illness, and
even religion would enter the fray, complicating for close to a century attempts
to find and settle on scientific answers to scientific questions.
For long stretches of time, the role of blood kinship in shaping human and
nonhuman altruism occupied some of the best minds in science. We shall see
why four British scientists—Charles Robert Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley,
J.B.S. Haldane, and finally W. D. Hamilton—devoted a good piece of their
working lives to the question of kinship and altruism and how that obsession
transformed their own lives. Along the way, we will encounter the Russian
Prince Petr Kropotkin, the most important anarchist of his time, and two
American academics—the Quaker scientist Warder Allee and a suicidal
intellectual giant named George Price.
Eventually biology did solve the puzzle of blood kinship and altruism in the
form of a mathematical equation developed by a shy, brilliant evolutionary
biologist named William D. Hamilton. Hamilton came onto the stage in the
1960s, and using the costbenefit perspective we most often associate with
economists, along with a deep understanding of how evolution operates, crisply
and precisely laid out a simple mathematical model explaining why individuals
treat blood kin in such a special way. Phrased in the hard, cold language of
natural selection, Hamilton’s model boils down to this: blood relatives share
many of the same genes, and so by helping kin, you are indirectly helping
yourself. Of course, it is a bit more complicated than that, but we will get into
the complications soon enough.
Although it took more than a decade for the implications of his work to take
hold, Hamilton’s model on altruism and blood kinship eventually gained him the
ultimate scientific accolade— a rule that bears his name. This rule’s influence on
evolutionary biology has been as great as the impact of Newton’s laws of motion
on physics. Yet the story of how it was discovered, how it changed the lives of
the men who worked on its discovery, and why even its discoverer wished that
the opposing position had turned out to be right, has never before been told.
But first things first. Our story of blood kinship and social behavior begins
where all stories of evolution begin—with Charles Darwin.