Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
primarily our relatives? Is action beyond the group possible or, as
Hamilton suggested, will civilization gradually erode self-sacrificial
behavior? This point is complicated by the absence of Trivers's preface
in the 1989 edition of
The Selfish Gene
, together with these sentences
by Dawkins in the first chapter: “My purpose is to examine the biology
of selfishness and altruism. . . . Apart from its academic interest, the
human importance of this subject is obvious. It touches every aspect of
our social lives, our loving and hating, fighting and cooperating, giving
and stealing, our greed and our generosity.”
40
Even though Dawkins affirms that his focus is behavior, not motive—
the effects of one's act, not one's subjective dispositions—the language
here certainly is open to a discussion of motives, even though there is a
strong attempt to redefine such terms. Thus, in the definition of altruism
as behavior “to increase another such entity's welfare at the expense of
its own,”
41
welfare is understood as one's chance of survival. One looks
at outcome, not motives. A selfish gene therefore tries “to get more
numerous in the gene pool. Basically the gene does this by helping to
program the bodies in which it finds itself to survive and to reproduce.”
Nevertheless—and this is a critical issue for my argument here—“a gene
might be able to assist
replicas
of itself that are sitting in other bodies.
If so, this would appear as an act of individual altruism but it would be
brought about by gene selfishness.”
42
The key way in which such genetically altruistic acts occur is through
kin selection or within-family altruism, one that increases the greatest
net benefit to one's genes—that is, ensures the highest success rate for a
particular gene. As Dawkins phrases it:
A gene for suicidally saving five cousins would not become more numerous in
the population, but a gene for saving five brothers or ten first cousins would.
The minimum requirement for a suicidal altruistic gene to be successful is that
it should save more than two siblings (or children or parents), or more than four
half-siblings (or uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, grandparents, grandchildren), or
more than eight first cousins, etc. Such a gene, on average, tends to live on in
the bodies of enough individuals saved by the altruist to compensate for the death
of the altruist itself.
43
And so Dawkins concludes, “I have made the simplifying assumption
that the individual animal works out what is best for his genes.”
44
This is essentially what Wilson calls hard-core altruism, and he
describes such behavior as “the enemy of civilization.” Soft-core altruism,
