Dr. John Young                                                                                                                             5/13/07

Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville

Scientists on Altruism

Unitarian Universalists perceive scientific discoveries as a significant foundation for their spirituality; it is a part of our 5^th tradition. Contained within our faith is a paradox. The complexity of much of contemporary science makes it fairly impenetrable without advanced scientific degrees. Even working scientists may become quite ignorant about current understandings and certainly the spiritual implications of those understandings in sciences beyond their own specialties. We depend upon technologies and scientific wisdom without necessarily having a clue about how they work or what they mean. In our UU tradition, we do not think that ignorance is bliss; so, we need to periodically make a good faith effort to penetrate the current forest of scientific wisdom and figure out how to identify and understand the spiritual implications of its appropriately relevant ‘trees.’ Otherwise, awed by the amazing forest of scientific knowledge, we will remain blind to the relevant trees of scientific wisdom of direct relevance for our lives.

One way to effectively proceed with this effort is to find a good current book by a reputable scientist that addresses a central spiritual question and helps us to understand what scientists are discovering about this particular spiritual dilemma. Lee Dugatkin’s 2006 book by Princeton University Press, The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness, is such a book. Lee Dugatkin is a professor of biology at the University of Louisville and has written earlier books on cooperation and behavioral ecology. Beginning with Charles Darwin himself and concluding with the current debates among Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, and Stephen Jay Gould’s critiques of both, and you have in a single volume a fascinating summary of the continuing evolution of our scientific understanding of altruism. Altruism for UU humanists, mystics, activists, and theists alike is a central spiritual virtue. Dugatkin’s book is much more fun because he provides us with the biographies, beliefs, fears, and triumphs of each of these scientists so that we can understand how who they were and what they believed impacted what they studied and how they interpreted what they discovered. Too often scientific discoveries are treated as immaculate conceptions, untouched by personality, politics, or ideology. That is an attitude of cancerous ignorance that we need to consistently overcome. The questions of altruism include: 1. why people or other organisms incur personal costs in order to help others? 2. What are the benefits of being good? 3. Do certain relationships with others make it more likely that one will make such sacrifices?

            When Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution through natural selection in the late 1850s, altruism really worried him because he was afraid that the altruistic behavior apparent, for instance in honey bees, might be fatal to his theory. He knew that evolution worked not only in survival but on behavior. Darwin intuited that the answers to altruism had to do with blood kinship and thus with selection at the level of the entire community rather than only the individual. He found confirmations in cattle breeding and the social insects, but genetics was not yet known, and so he simply hypothesized that altruism could and did evolve in other organisms besides humans. Charles Darwin was raised as and identified himself as a Unitarian. One of our classrooms here at UUCJ is named in his honor. Strongly in favor of altruistic behavior; Darwin wanted to nurture a loving and justice-practicing humanity, but he also wanted his theory of evolution through natural selection to be popularly embraced, and the fact that altruistic behavior seemed to undermine the theory continued to trouble him.

            The man who did the most to popularize Darwin’s theory was Thomas Henry Huxley who named himself ‘Darwin’s bulldog.’ Huxley argued that “altruism is hardly ever to be expected and when it appears, it will always be tied to blood kinship.” Huxley was very much a Victorian English gentleman and saw this pitiless struggle for existence as inevitable. He was surrounded by rapid industrialization that was producing tragic conditions for masses of people while making a privileged minority extremely rich and comfortable. In the same period, a member of the Russian nobility, Prince Petr Kropotkin had escaped to England because of his anarchist views. Whereas Huxley, like Darwin, had studied nature primarily in the coastal tropics, where nature was in over-populated competing abundance, Kropotkin had studied nature primarily in Siberia, where there was under-population in extreme hardship, and Kropotkin was moved by how often both animals and humans cooperated and acted altruistically. Huxley saw nature as red in tooth and claw while Kropotkin saw nature as the pinnacle of cooperation. Huxley embraced Victorian capitalism and imperialism, and was almost as fervent about Malthus as about Darwin, while Kropotkin embraced local cooperation and independence, was amazed by the Earth’s abundance and entitled his classic 1902 book, Mutual Aid. For Huxley, the family was the only saving grace in a merciless world. For Kropotkin, the family might be superseded by chosen, intentional cooperative communities. The battle raged between them. Both had many examples from nature and people, fervent supporters and critics.

            The next scientist to add appreciably to our understanding of altruism was American ecologist Warder Allee beginning in the 1920s at the University of Chicago. Allee was an expert on tiny crustaceans called isopods. He devised an ingenuous experiment that demonstrated that faced with water scarcity isolated isopods quickly died while isopods who were allowed to gather into groups each consumed appreciably less water and survived much longer. Even crustaceans could learn to conserve! Then he studied flatworms which when confronted with poisonous silver cooperated to fight the poison. Then, he studied naturally solitary starfish that when they did not have their ideal eelgrass environment quickly gathered in groups to promote group survival. Allee was a fervent Quaker and pacifist. He wanted to nurture a world where people treated everyone like family. By demonstrating that even the most rudimentary organisms cooperated and practiced altruistic behavior, Allee hoped to help people learn to curb violence and aggression and promote cooperative behavior. At the end of his career, Allee was chair of the biology department at the University of Florida. The university’s president memorialized Allee: “having brought the greatest word from science since Darwin, his evidence for cooperation gives us new hope.”

            Next we consider the three founding fathers of population genetics: JBS Haldane, Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright. Haldane and Julian Huxley said that: “the one great difference between man and all other animals is that for them evolution must always be a blind force, of which they are quite unconscious; whereas man has, in some measure at least, the possibility of consciously controlling evolution according to his wishes.” Haldane began to understand genetic linkage, how a set of genes are passed down from one generation to another, because they reside near one another on a chromosome and are inherited as a unit rather than piecemeal. Haldane’s models helped geneticists see that natural selection operating in a slow methodical fashion could produce significant evolutionary change even when the trait was altruistic behavior. One of his vivid examples was two female deer. One habitually abandons its young when a predator approaches. As an individual, the abandoning mother is more likely to survive, but she is less likely to have as many progeny survive. Ronald Fisher studied sophisticated characteristics like insects having a bad taste that seemed self-sacrificial but helped the group to survive. Sewell Wright was Allee’s colleague, and he brought economic cost-benefit analysis and mathematical models together to explain the relationships between blood kinship and altruistic behavior.

            It was, however, William Hamilton in England who developed the basic formula about altruistic behavior. His parents were New Zealanders, his father an engineer and his mother a doctor, and he grew up as an avid naturalist and experimenter who ended up combining genetics, evolution, anthropology, and economics in his work on altruism. I suspect that those scientists who are most able to combine existing fields are probably the most likely to make breakthroughs relevant for our future value choices. They teach themselves to break out of the traditional boxes that often imprison even scientific creativity. Hamilton’s papers, beginning in 1963, argued that evolution has shaped behavior and that altruistic behavior, to promote other members at the expense of the individual, are obviously evolved to preserve the species rather than the individual. He proposed Hamilton’s rule, which is on the top of your Order of Service cover: R=which is genetic relatedness times B=the benefits which accrue to the survival of the species must outweigh or be greater than the costs to the species. Altruistic behavior pays off for the survival or success of your kin and so altruistic individuals are prepared to endure the costs of their self-sacrificial behavior. Scientists had thought that an individual could only succeed or fail genetically by passing along their own genes, but altruistic behavior allows them to promote what they hold dear through their help in nurturing the survival of others with the characteristics they value.

            George Price at the University of Chicago demonstrated that spiteful acts not only lower the fitness of the individual committing it, but decrease the fitness of the recipient to an ever greater extent. Price was relatively unknown and the famous journal, Nature, would not publish his paper. Hamilton and Price had become friends; so, Hamilton hatched a strategy to get Price’s paper published. Price re-wrote his paper and resubmitted it; Hamilton submitted a paper that depended upon Price’s work. Nature wanted the famous Hamilton’s paper; so, Nature agreed to publish both papers. They used altruistic methods to make an end-run around Nature’s non-altruistic tendencies.

            The general public knew little about Hamilton’s work for a decade. This changed with the publication of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology in 1975 and Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene in 1976. Most people are misled by Dawkins’ title to think that he is arguing that genes benefit the individual in which they reside and no one else, but, in fact, Dawkins is proposing that Hamilton’s kinship theories of altruistic behavior explain new ways that selfish genes get copies of themselves into the next generations. Wilson’s Sociobiology is a compendium of evidence that social behavior, both animal and human, is a product of natural selection. Perhaps Dawkins’ and Wilson’s most effective and persistent critic was Wilson’s colleague at Harvard, Stephen J. Gould. Gould argued that both were relying too heavily on the power of natural selection, missing the forest of large-scale macro-evolutionary changes for the trees of micro-evolutionary changes. Studying social insects, scientists were demonstrating that non-replicating workers were nevertheless mathematically increasing those most like themselves. Other scientists were demonstrating that many birds remained personally non-productive in order to help their mothers raise more siblings in environments of scarcity or danger. Altruism is rampant in nature.

            By 1977, Bill Hamilton had shifted to the University of Michigan, and he met a political scientist and game theorist there named Robert Axelrod. They collaborated and pushed the scope of Hamilton’s rule into new and uncharted territories. This is the other formula on your Order of Service cover. They call it a Tit for Tat process, but it is apparent that it is more complicated than simply Tit for Tat. The first step in the behavior set is that your initial strategy is to be nice, to act cooperatively. Then, if the other person in the situation responds negatively, you would often retaliate in kind. However, as soon as you can get the other person to cooperate again, you forgive the other person’s past bad behavior and simply recognize the last good behavior as what you are responding to and go back to cooperating. I have been so bold as to re-state the Axelrod-Hamilton strategy as follows. Begin with nice, with cooperative, mutually positive behavior. Generally tend to practice reciprocity. However, usually forgive when good behavior is resumed by the other person. You may also choose to continue good behavior when the relative cost is low and/or when persuasion of the other seems probable.

            This provides a scientific foundation for systematic altruistic behavior. As most of us know from painful personal experience, spiteful, aggressive, or greedy behaviors have a strong tendency to blow up in your face and to lead to increasing isolation and unhappiness. The reality for most of us in most situations is that we need to figure out ways to get along with the people around us. Acting with them as if they were enemy combatants is usually the road to failed relationships and missed opportunities. So, generally, it is smart to begin by being nice, by acting in ways that are mutually affirming. If, the other persons them prove themselves unworthy by acting in negative ways, we may still often choose to continue our own constructive behavior, either because we have reason to believe that the benefits of such behavior on our part out-weight the costs of such behavior, and/or we may have evidence or experience that we can by acting positively persuade the other person to once again also act appropriately. In many situations, once the other person returns to positive behavior, it is our learned wisdom to forgive them for past mistakes and proceed with them, again expecting the best rather than fearing the worst.

Bottom line here: altruism generally works. Human beings can systematically reinforce the altruistic tendencies in natural selection to speed up the sustainable evolution of human culture. On Mother’s Day, let’s take comfort in the scientific discoveries that make clear that altruism is found throughout the natural world. Let’s formulate ways to behave that help us evolve quickly to more effectively sustain our species and the natural world on which we depend. These nurturing and loving choices are the best way to celebrate good parenting all year. Altruism’s costs are much outweighed by its benefits, both to us as individuals and most certainly to the highest values we share.