Forty years ago, biologist E.O. Wilson helped to champion kin selection theory, the idea that an organism trying to pass its genes down to future generations can do so indirectly, by helping a relative to survive and procreate. Now he’s changed his mind. “Kin selection is wrong,” Wilson said. “That’s it. It’s wrong.”
Naturally, his fellow evolutionary biologists are ready to lynch him:
What Wilson is trying to do, late in his influential career, is nothing less than overturn a central plank of established evolutionary theory: the origins of altruism. His position is provoking ferocious criticism from other scientists. Last month, the leading scientific journal Nature published five strongly worded letters saying, more or less, that Wilson has misunderstood the theory of evolution and generally doesn’t know what he’s talking about. One of these carried the signatures of an eye-popping 137 scientists, including two of Wilson’s colleagues at Harvard.
His new argument, in a nutshell, amounts to a frontal attack on long-accepted ideas about one of the great mysteries of evolution: why one creature would ever help another at its own expense. Natural selection means that the fittest pass down their genes to the next generation, and every organism would seem to have an overwhelming incentive to survive and reproduce. Yet, strangely, self-sacrifice exists in the natural world, even though it would seem to put individual organisms at an evolutionary disadvantage: The squirrel that lets out a cry to warn of a nearby predator is necessarily putting itself in danger. How could genes that lead to such behavior persist in a population over time? It’s a question that bedeviled even Charles Darwin, who considered altruism a serious challenge to his theory of evolution.
Wilson’s co-author on the Nature paper claims that the people who signed letters disputing his paper don’t understand the mathematical argument. (Not surprisingly, really. If biologists knew how to do math they would have become physicists.)
Whether Wilson will eventually be vindicated remains to be seen. But in the meantime it’s fun watching the spat.
Related: Tom Bethel, Against Sociobiology (Jan. 2001)
April 20th, 2011 | 11:33 am
[...] at First Things, this blog post links to this article, in which pretty much the entire profession of evolutionary biology comes [...]
April 20th, 2011 | 11:43 am
Having read a bunch of both Wilson and Dawkins (the go-to guy for evolutionary orthodoxy – so the linked article goes to him) I can’t help thinking Wilson is wrong here – but my sympathies are with him, if only because the reaction of cool, dispassionate Science to his theory is a bit snarly.
A really separate issue: Equating human altruism in all its baffling complexity with the very particular and peculiar altruism of animals is quite a leap, philosophically. If you assume human consciousness and cognition are merely emergent properties of matter – and that will never be anything other than an assumption – then you can maybe convince yourself that a guy who dives off a bridge into freezing water to save some stranger’s kids is just trying to promote the survival of his genes or his group.
Seems a bit of a stretch.
April 20th, 2011 | 12:27 pm
[...] O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists are having a fight about the origin of altruism, specifically, whether group selection or kin selection best explains its origin. Interestingly, [...]
April 20th, 2011 | 10:06 pm
What you have conveniently left out, and not taken into consideration:
‘The alternative theory holds that the origins of altruism and teamwork have nothing to do with kinship or the degree of relatedness between individuals. The key, Wilson said, is the group: Under certain circumstances, groups of cooperators can out-compete groups of non-cooperators, thereby ensuring that their genes — including the ones that predispose them to cooperation — are handed down to future generations. This so-called group selection, Wilson insists, is what forms the evolutionary basis for a variety of advanced social behaviors linked to altruism, teamwork, and tribalism…’
Yes, that’s right – there is an alternative theory (the group) that has been put forth by Wilson, one that is, in his opinion anyway, a more accurate theory of the origin of altruism within the evolutionary context.
‘Yet Wilson said he doesn’t have a choice in the matter. “I think that’d be a pretty poor scientist, who couldn’t reverse his view from new evidence,” he said.’
Exactly. When new evidence is revealed that sheds light on a subject of enquiry that one happens to be engaged in, the sensible thing to do is to take it into consideration. Scientists who ignore new evidence are not just ‘pretty poor’; they are not scientists to begin with.
‘What has really fired people up about the paper is the assertion that the mathematical equation underlying Hamilton’s theory does not work, and that attempts to use it over the past four decades to explain the natural world have produced “meagre” results.’
If an idea ‘does not work’ (like the equation ‘underlying Hamilton’s theory’) then it has to be rejected in favour of an idea that does work.
I’m assuming that the reason for this article being on ‘First Things’ is that the author (Joe Carter) somehow believes that this controversy deals another death blow to Darwinism, when it actually does nothing of the kind. Am I correct?
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