Altruism

A great deal of academic ink has been spent on the question of whether there is a gene for altruism. On whether, why or how altruism might be favoured by Darwinian natural selection.

One part of this debate was Dawkins' 'The Selfish Gene', a book which has been on my shelves for many years. I may have read it once, but the general line of which, as far as I can recall, was that it was every gene for itself.

Then yesterday the debate pops up in Hurford (see 15th August and http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~jim/), during which, inter alia, I was much struck by the notion that the totems and clans which Claude Lévi-Strauss writes so much about are as much a device to help the spread of cooperation and altruism out from the nuclear family group as anything else. Hurford also points up what it obvious once he has said it, that humans got where they are now because they cooperate with each other and that they can cooperate with each other to the extent that they do because they have language. Cooperation amongst other large animals, by comparison, is very limited in the wild, rarely going beyond a parent helping a partner or a child, other than in the context of social animals hunting down other animals for food.

And all this cooperation is now a matter of culture rather than a matter of genes. Genes might have been necessary back in the beginning, say 100,000 years ago, to get it all started, but they are not necessary now. We can even cope with a modest amount of gene-driven cheating, a modest number of selfish genes, with cultural pressures keeping the lid on.

All of which combines, for me, to make the debate about genetic altruism uninteresting. Humans are successful, in some large part because they are altruistic and because they have language, and I am not much bothered about the minutiae of the genetic and evolutionary processes which got this started. Nor am I convinced that the gene is the right level at which to study such matters and I remain a specist.

PS: I don't recall coming across the point of totems in Claude Lévi-Strauss, other than as a device to keep inbreeding down. Although I grant that this is quite important too.