Kindness in a Cruel World: The Evolution of Altruism by Nigel Barber. Prometheus, $28, 415 pages.

The Chapel Hill News

April 17, 2005

Nice guys finish ... where?

By Phillip Manning


Tennyson penned the lines, “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” before Charles Darwin wrote “The Origin of Species,” but the great poet’s phrase captured the essence of Darwin’s new world. Life, according to natural selection, was a grim, dog-eat-dog existence where every organism competed with other organisms to survive and reproduce. Survival of the fittest became the Darwinian mantra. Almost 100 years later, Leo “The Lip” Durocher, the scrappy manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers came up with the line that would outlive his stellar baseball accomplishments. “Nice guys,” said The Lip, “finish last.” Today’s biologists tend to agree. Most of us are selfish most of the time, writes the acclaimed zoologist Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene.” “If you wish...to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature,” he concludes pessimistically.

But is such pessimism justified? In his new book, “Kindness in a Cruel World,” Nigel Barber gives example after example of altruism in humans and animals. He defines altruism “as actions that help another individual at some cost to the altruist.” Clearly, few of us would be here except for the sacrifices made by our mothers who nursed us, protected us, and kept us warm and dry. And most other mammal moms do the same for their offspring.

Why do mothers do this, risking their own well being for the sake of their young? Altruism has long puzzled evolutionary biologists, who wonder how natural selection could promote it. Natural selection should favor selfishness. In a food shortage, for example, selfish individuals would take advantage of the altruistic person, who might starve before she could reproduce, taking her altruistic gene to the grave. So how did altruism arise? In the early 1960s, the English biologist William Hamilton proposed an answer. Altruism can arise by natural selection, Hamilton said, if the beneficiaries of the altruism are close relatives of the altruist. To see why, we must look at natural selection from the perspective of what is actually surviving from generation to generation. It’s not the individual; you and I are doomed, along with every other living creature. Only our genes have the potential to carry on, and to understand altruism, we must look at it from the point of view of the gene itself.

The old saw that a chicken is just an egg’s way making another egg is true. Genes run the show. Thus, a gene (or genes) for altruism could be passed down from one generation to the next by my children or by close relatives who share many of my genes. “From the gene’s perspective,” Barber writes, “it does not matter whether the copy is made by direct reproduction or indirectly through the reproduction of blood relatives.” For instance, if a crow spots an approaching hawk and gives a warning cry, that heads up enables the rest of the flock to take cover. But it also tells the hawk the alarm-giver’s position, jeopardizing its life. From the genes’ point of view such risks are worthwhile because other members of the flock have many of the same genes, and the warning cry enhances their odds of surviving. This idea, known as kin selection altruism, is well established, but it leaves unanswered another question. What about altruism among strangers, a trait known as reciprocal altruism? What would make a person jump in a river to save a complete stranger? Or adopt an unrelated child to raise?

Barber makes the case that reciprocal altruism evolved during the thousands of millennia that our species spent as hunter-gatherers. Typically, our ancestors lived in small tribes. Food sharing developed within the tribe because a large game animal is more food than one family can eat, and without refrigeration, much of the meat would spoil before it could be devoured. Furthermore, even the best hunters kill big game only infrequently. In such societies, food sharing among families makes sense. Over time, Barber argues, genes for cooperating with others would prevail, building in reciprocal altruism as a human trait that aids survival.

Humans are not the only animals capable of cooperating with one another. Vampire bats will regurgitate blood to feed a starving mate, and chimpanzees will neglect their own grooming to pick ticks off a buddy. Such behavior could benefit the individual because the people (or animals) who give are also the ones most likely to get. Thus, the cooperative genes carried by these people, genes that care only about themselves, could survive and flourish. Even the pessimistic Dawkins finds some solace in this idea, writing that “even with selfish genes at the helm, nice guys can finish first.”
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