[extropy-chat] Somewhat pessimistic view of teaching EP

[Brian Atkins]

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19225772.500-survival-of-the-nicest.html

Survival of the nicest

     * 11 November 2006
       Lee Alan Dugatkin

ALTRUISM - helping others at a cost to oneself - has been a stubborn thorn in 
the side of evolutionary biologists. If natural selection favours genes that 
produce traits which increase the reproductive success of the individuals in 
which they reside, then altruism is precisely the sort of behaviour that should 
disappear.

Darwin was acutely aware of the problem that altruism posed for his theory of 
natural selection. He was particularly worried about the self-sacrificial 
behaviour that social insects display: how could natural selection explain why a 
worker bee will defend its hive by stinging an intruder and dying in the 
process? In On the Origin of Species, he summarised the topic of social insect 
altruism as "one special difficulty, which at first appeared to me to be 
insuperable, and actually fatal to the whole theory". But then he came up with 
an explanation.

Since worker bees were helping blood relatives - especially their queen - Darwin 
hypothesised that natural selection might favour altruism at the level of blood 
kin. One hundred and four years later, the biologist Bill Hamilton would 
formalise Darwin's idea, but the path from Darwin to Hamilton was not smooth. 
The nature of altruism and its similarities to the human trait of goodness make 
it susceptible to political, philosophical and religious subjectivity. Studying 
the structure of an atom isn't personal: studying altruism can be. It certainly 
was for the next two figures in the history of altruism, Thomas Huxley and Peter 
Kropotkin.

Huxley, also known as "Darwin's bulldog", outlined his thoughts on this topic in 
an 1888 essay entitled "The struggle for existence": "From the point of view of 
the moralist, the animal world is on about the same level as the gladiator's 
show... Life [for prehistoric people] was a continuous free fight, and beyond 
the limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each 
against all was the normal state of existence." For Huxley, altruism was rare, 
but when it occurred, it should be between blood relatives.

Kropotkin, once a page to the tsar of Russia and later a naturalist who spent 
five years studying natural history in Siberia, thought otherwise. In Siberia he 
thought that he saw altruism divorced from kinship in every species he came 
across. "Don't compete!" Kropotkin wrote in his influential book Mutual Aid: A 
factor of evolution (1902). "That is the watchword which comes to us from the 
bush, the forest, the river, the ocean. Therefore combine - practice mutual aid!"

How could two respected scientists come to such radically different conclusions? 
In addition to being a naturalist, Kropotkin was also the world's most famous 
anarchist. He believed that if animals could partake in altruism in the absence 
of government, then civilised society needed no government either, and could 
live in peace, behaving altruistically. Kropotkin was following what he saw as 
"the course traced by the modern philosophy of evolution... society as an 
aggregation of organisms trying to find out the best ways of combining the wants 
of the individuals with those of co-operation". He saw anarchism as the next 
phase of evolution.

Huxley was no less affected by events around him. Shortly before he published 
"The struggle for existence", his daughter, Mady, died of complications related 
to a mental illness. In his despair over Mady's passing he wrote, "You see a 
meadow rich in flower... and your memory rests upon it as an image of peaceful 
beauty. It is a delusion... not a bird twitters but is either slayer or slain... 
murder and sudden death are the order of the day." It was in the light of nature 
as the embodiment of struggle and destruction - the antithesis of altruism - 
that Huxley saw the death of his daughter and it was in that mindset that he 
penned his essay.

A suite of other fascinating characters would follow Huxley and Kropotkin. In 
the US there was the Quaker ecologist Warder Clyde Allee, who did the first real 
experiments on altruism in the 1930s and whose religious and scientific writings 
on the subject were often indistinguishable; in fact, he would often swipe text 
from one and add it to the other. Around the same time in the UK, J.B.S. 
Haldane, one of the founders of population genetics, was talking of altruism and 
kinship, and came close to developing a mathematical theory on the subject. But 
he stopped short - nobody quite knows why.

A mathematical theory for the evolution of altruism and its relation to blood 
kinship would come a generation later with Bill Hamilton, who was both a 
passionate naturalist and a gifted mathematician. While working on his PhD in 
the early 1960s, he built a complex mathematical model to describe blood kinship 
and the evolution of altruism. Fortunately, the model boiled down to a simple 
equation, now known as Hamilton's rule. The equation has only three variables: 
the cost of altruism to the altruist (c), the benefit that a recipient of 
altruism receives (b) and their genetic relatedness (r). Hamilton's rule states 
that natural selection favours altruism when r × b > c.

Hamilton's equation amounts to this: if a gene for altruism is to evolve, then 
the cost of altruism must be balanced by compensating benefits. In his model, 
the benefits can be accrued by blood relatives of the altruist because there's a 
chance (the probability r) that such relatives may also carry that gene for 
altruism. In other words, a gene for altruism can spread if it helps copies of 
itself residing in blood kin.

A generation of biologists were profoundly affected by Hamilton's rule. One them 
was the population geneticist George Price, an eclectic genius who became 
depressed when he came across Hamilton's work. He had hoped that goodness was 
exempt from scientific analysis, but Hamilton's theory seemed to demonstrate 
otherwise. Price went through the mathematics in the model and realised that 
Hamilton had underestimated the power of his own theory.

While working with Hamilton on kinship and altruism, the atheist Price underwent 
a religious epiphany. In an irony that turns the debate about religion and 
evolution on its head, Price believed that his findings on altruism were the 
result of divine inspiration. He became a devout Christian, donating most of his 
money to helping the poor. At various times he lived as a squatter; at other 
times he slept on the floor at the Galton Laboratory of University College 
London, where he was working. Price lived the life of the altruists that he had 
modelled mathematically.

Since Hamilton published his model, thousands of experiments have directly or 
indirectly tested predictions emerging from his rule, and the results are 
encouraging. Hamilton's rule doesn't explain all the altruism we see but it 
explains a sizeable chunk of it. With time, Hamilton himself began to realise 
the power of his model, as well as its implications, and was somewhat dismayed 
that altruism could be boiled down to a simple equation: "I like always to 
imagine that I and we are above all that, subject to far more mysterious laws," 
he noted in volume 1 of his book Narrow Roads of Gene Land. "In this prejudice, 
however, I seem, rather sadly, to have been losing more ground than I gain. The 
theory I outline... has turned out very successful. It... illuminates not only 
animal behaviour but, to some extent as yet unknown but actively being 
researched, human behaviour as well."

 From issue 2577 of New Scientist magazine, 11 November 2006, page 56-57
-- 
Brian Atkins
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
http://www.singinst.org/