WD Hamilton was ‘a good candidate for the title of most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin’. His most important contribution was a Darwinian explanation of altruism, a problem over which Darwin himself admitted to having had sleepless nights.
This scenario highlights the altruims conundrum:
People gather on the bank of the river they see a figure in the fast flowing river, clearly struggling
the figure gesticualtes, but clearly s/he is not waving - but drowning. This is apparent to the growing crowd who watch.
A man starts to take off his shows, his trousers and jacket and proceeds to wade into the river in his underpants. He starts to swim out to the struggling person. As the people on the back watch stunned
the rescuer reaches the drowning figure and starts dragging him/her back buy the scruff of his collar.
When he reaches the river bank with the saved one, there is loud applause.
The man who risked his life and rescued the drowning person was not a realtive and had never seen this before. When asked why he did it, he replies,oh it was just instinctive. We might call this the
quintessential act of altruism.
However to understand this act, rather than gloss over it as instinctive we mut look to bumble bees and evolution.
Why, in a naturally selected world in which reproduction counts for everything, would a worker bee forego reproduction in order to assist her mother, the queen, in producing more offspring?
In Darwinian terms, giving up the chance to breed (the rescuer, a young man might hav given up the chance to reproduce in carrying such unselfish act) is the most extreme form of altruism conceivable.
However, since we share genes with our relatives, having offspring of our own is only one of several ways of ensuring that our genes are passed on to the next generation.
However the revolutionary biologist W D Hamilton pointed out: that given the unusual patterns of relatedness within a bee colony, it makes sense – from the point of view of passing on genes – for a worker bee to assist the queen in producing more offspring instead of producing them herself.
Alluding to the classical Darwinian idea of ‘fitness’ (originally an indication of an individual’s fit to its environment but subsequently simply a measure of its evolutionary success), Hamilton coined the term ‘inclusive fitness’ for this notion that genes can be passed on indirectly via relatives, and his prediction that altruism is preferentially directed in this way became the lynchpin of many evolutionary analyses of human behaviour. It also generated a whole new perspective in evolutionary biology.
What matters is that genes are being passed on: the details of who is doing the passing on is secondary. The resulting ‘gene’s-eye view’ of the evolutionary process, a direct outgrowth of Hamilton’s insight, was most famously articulated by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene.
This scenario highlights the altruims conundrum:
People gather on the bank of the river they see a figure in the fast flowing river, clearly struggling
the figure gesticualtes, but clearly s/he is not waving - but drowning. This is apparent to the growing crowd who watch.
A man starts to take off his shows, his trousers and jacket and proceeds to wade into the river in his underpants. He starts to swim out to the struggling person. As the people on the back watch stunned
the rescuer reaches the drowning figure and starts dragging him/her back buy the scruff of his collar.
When he reaches the river bank with the saved one, there is loud applause.
The man who risked his life and rescued the drowning person was not a realtive and had never seen this before. When asked why he did it, he replies,oh it was just instinctive. We might call this the
quintessential act of altruism.
However to understand this act, rather than gloss over it as instinctive we mut look to bumble bees and evolution.
Why, in a naturally selected world in which reproduction counts for everything, would a worker bee forego reproduction in order to assist her mother, the queen, in producing more offspring?
In Darwinian terms, giving up the chance to breed (the rescuer, a young man might hav given up the chance to reproduce in carrying such unselfish act) is the most extreme form of altruism conceivable.
However, since we share genes with our relatives, having offspring of our own is only one of several ways of ensuring that our genes are passed on to the next generation.
However the revolutionary biologist W D Hamilton pointed out: that given the unusual patterns of relatedness within a bee colony, it makes sense – from the point of view of passing on genes – for a worker bee to assist the queen in producing more offspring instead of producing them herself.
Alluding to the classical Darwinian idea of ‘fitness’ (originally an indication of an individual’s fit to its environment but subsequently simply a measure of its evolutionary success), Hamilton coined the term ‘inclusive fitness’ for this notion that genes can be passed on indirectly via relatives, and his prediction that altruism is preferentially directed in this way became the lynchpin of many evolutionary analyses of human behaviour. It also generated a whole new perspective in evolutionary biology.
What matters is that genes are being passed on: the details of who is doing the passing on is secondary. The resulting ‘gene’s-eye view’ of the evolutionary process, a direct outgrowth of Hamilton’s insight, was most famously articulated by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene.
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