The Evolution of Altruism: Science, Biology, and Human Kindness

[00:00:05]Lucy says I'm intrigued by this view you have on the purpose of Life Charlie Brown you say we're put here on Earth to make others happy Charlie Brown replies that's right Lucy says what are the others put here for well that's a very good question what I want to talk about today is where kindness comes from and more specifically where altruism comes from and this is really a question that man kind has been contemplating since the beginning of time uh different religious Traditions have offered the notion of a god creating man in his own image that's where kindness comes from uh secular Traditions have spoken about the use of reason to reach the good in the right um in general the fault lines have been uh are we talking about some kind of inheritance whether whether Divine or or natural or is this a construction and for the first time in the 19th century this man Charles Darwin um made it a scientific problem because when he was Writing On the Origin of Species he perceived immediately that here was a paradox what is the Paradox how does one explain the Persistence of traits that reduce Fitness If evolution is a story of survival of the fittest it seems not to make sense and in fact Darwin wrote Every complex structure and Instinct should be useful to the possessor natural selection could never produce in a being anything injurious to itself for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each and yet natural selection had produced an enormous amount of altruism I'd like to give you a number of examples uh from the natural world so these are Honeypot ants from the American deserts and their sole job in life is to hang upside down backwards like great big pots of sugared water and wait until they're tapped by the queen or its rude when whenever they're thirsty other words these are lifelong wet nurses that's all they do in life These are termites uh entire cases of of termites forego reproduction altogether they do not reproduce their Fitness equals zero no children no project this is a very very well-known case of the honey bee the stinging bee when the bee stings The Sting is launched inside the skin and it really eviscerates uh it the stomach of the of the um of the honeybee uh the honeybee has sacrificed itself for its brothers and sisters but alistic behavior isn't limited to um to the what are called the social insects or the HRA this is one of my famous favorite uh examples this is a social amoeba called disco disum now the amoeba usually is single cell autonomous individual single celled organism Burrows in the in the ground and it does very well there except when when times are tough it emits a chemical signal a cyclic and all the rest of the amoeba in the area do the same and they begin to converge on this gradient of the of the chemical signal and when they come together they create a slug now this slug is now an individual autonomous uh organism and each one of the formally autonomous amoeba have now forgot given up their individuality and they are now cells in the body of this one single being now the single being has sensors it has sensors for light and for air and it sort of walks around the forest and when it finds light in air then something unbelievable happens the top 20% of the slug the head of the slug create out of their bodies a kind of stalk which allows the bottom 80% To Shimmy up the stalk and to create a kind of orb it look you see it looks like a lollipop now these are spores and now they have a good good chance of being Carried Away by a felicitous wind wind or on the wings of an unsuspecting insect so what's happened is the top 20% have sacrificed themselves for the bottom 80% other examples include plants this is a yellow Jewel weave which under conditions of light deprivation doesn't do what you would expect it to do if it was an egoist quote unquote in other words it doesn't allocate energy to the creation of leaves in order to soak up as much sun as it can but rather uh puts its energies into into other other things into stems and so forth and so doesn't and and in order in order to help its brothers and sisters who are around it altruistic behavior in gazelle's uh very well-known Behavior Uh you have particular Sentry gazel who um when they when they locate a predator lurking in the grass um engage in something called St in Behavior which is basically they jump up and down very high 6 feet ostensibly drawing all the fire of the lion and allowing the rest of the troop to to escape this is the Maman equivalent of the uh of the termite it's called The Blind African mole rat a very goodlooking organism and it's just and and Its Behavior is exactly equal to the to the behavior of termites in other words entire entire cases of individuals foro reproduction altogether so that this good-looker the queen can produce all the progeny baboons baboons spend an inordinate inordinate amount of time cleaning each other grooming behavior um now time is a proxy for Fitness because they could have been doing other things with their time that would have helped their Fitness and so this is also considered altruistic Behavior by the way if anyone in the audience has children who need to be cleaned baboons are very good uh very good cleaners throughout the 20th century scien has provided a number of answers to the question where does altruism come from how how could have altruism evolved if in fact this is some kind of paradox and I'm going to go over them very briefly the three that I'm going to talk about which are the main ones are nepotism reciprocation and group selection so the first one is nepotism you can read the the cartoon the guy formalized it mathematically was a man by the name of Bill ham Hamilton and this is basic basically the notion that altruism can evolve if it happens between kin between members of the same family now this is based on a particular point of view the point of view of the gene in other words the gene doesn't care in what body it advances into the Next Generation as long as the same gene advances into the Next Generation so B basically this is this is an idea which was cribbed in a way from another genius and this is this is apocryphal but I'll tell it because it's a nice story anyway this guy JBS halding who apparently over his 17th beer in a pub in London sort of blurted out I'll give my life for two brothers and eight cousins this is the logic of the Jee eye point of view and this is the notion that that altruism can come if it happens between between kin the next idea is the idea of reciprocation uh Advanced most famously by a man by the name of Bob triers and this is basically the notion the simple notion of you scratch my back I'll scratch yours so uh you can already sort of imagine that into this kind of dynamic you can have tools like Game Theory uh doing a lot of work the final idea is this idea group selection group selection is to say that if two groups are competing which group will be more successful the altruistic group or a group with many altruists or a group with as opposed to a group with less alist with more egoist what do you think the altruist the altruist are all they're all cooperating with one another and so they'll be they'll be uh they'll be more successful than a group where people are out for themselves or organisms are out for themselves however within the group what does it pay to be it pays to be an egoist because the egoist doesn't doesn't pay any kind of tax and so you see with with the evolution of altruism it's a kind of trait where there's a inherent conflict between the uh interest of the indiv idual and the interests of the group and the idea of group selection is to say that sometimes natural selection can work at the level level of the group rather than at the level of the individual now everything that I've been telling you about until now has to do with biological altruis and biological altruism is something very different than psychological altruism I'll explain what I mean biological altruism is defined by the result of a behavior so if you've acted in such a way so as to confer a fitness benefit on someone else El on another organism while incurring some kind of Fitness cost then you are by definition an altruist which is why we can have altruistic amiba now this is something very different from psychological altruism with the kind of altruism that we talk about when we talk about altruism between human beings I think the Unlucky bunny illustrates this very well the Unlucky bunny HS the old lady across the street now even if the Unlucky bunny is killed by a truck while doing so if the old lady knows that the intention of The Unlucky bunny was to be written into the will of the old lady and that's why he did it that's why he was kind then she and everyone else will rightly not consider him an altruist in other words psychological altruism is all about intention biological altruism doesn't even subsume mind that's why amiba can be uh altruists in the biological sense but of course the mind the organ which allows for intention to begin with is like any other part of our biological being something which has been subject to the ruthless skull of natural selection um it's not a part from the body so the real question the question that we're all interested in many scientists from many years have been interested in what is the connection um is there a connection and what is the connection how can we Define it between biological altruism on the one hand and psychological altruism on the other I want to tell you briefly about this man George price who in a in a way teaches us a very important lesson about our attempts to understand psychological altruism altruism in human beings based on our understanding of of altruism in nature George price was a very unusual individual kind of uh a kind of mix between a force scum character and a Rainman character incredibly brilliant uh very very strange socially probably I mean we're all somewhere on a spectrum but he was was probably closer on the on on the autism spectrum to to one side than most um a man whom was born in in in New York in 1922 a man whose uh uh interviewers at Harvard University when he arrived as a 17-year-old boy said of him may go Haywire but will never be hram which is to say he might go crazy but he'll never be boring and that was really spoton uh true about this guy uh like for scum he found himself at the center of different scientific and technological Revolutions in the 20th century working as a chemist in the in the Manhattan Project then uh making very important uh inventions on transistor research with people like uh shakle and bardine at Bell Labs leaving that becoming a oncologist leaving that becoming a writer then inventing computer a design for IBM but not but not taking out a patent joining IBM as a low rung worker and then obviously ly with computer a design IBM made a lot of money off of his invention um what happened to this this man was at sometime in the 60s he underwent a crisis and he decided that life really wasn't worth living anymore and so he left his family left his job against the good wishes of all his best friends left his country and decided to move to England to try to his hand it to crack one last great mystery and that was the mystery of where does altruism come where does kindness and altruism come from and he moved to England and within a very very short period of time he wrote a very short paper which he was able to somehow publish in nature no one knew who he was he wasn't part of any kind of community he had never trained in biology had no formal training in evolutionary biology and he wrote an equation you you probably you can't read this but there are no references here absolutely no references so it was complet completely suig generous came out of nowhere and he walked off the street literally into the one what was then one of the best genetics department in the world at University College London and showed it to a professor who had no idea who he was um and said is this is this new and within about 5 minutes had an honorary professorship in keys to his own office and then went home and I won't go through the whole story because we're short on time but when he began thinking about this equation philosophically his his very unusual mind concluded that the meaning of the equation is that altruism is always self-interest in Disguise whether it's helping it the gene or the individual or the group altruism is always self is always a kind of self-interest in other words the best that the natural process can do is a kind of secondhand goodness not a pure pure kindness and this was a terrible realization to him because by this time he had become an Evangelical Christian like I said a very unusual guy and he decided that he wasn't going to he he he he didn't agree to take this on board he was going to try to fight it in other words he was going to try to fight his own miraculous equation which came out of nowhere um and so he began a program of radical altruism in his own life to try to show that the human Spirit could do what the natural process the the natural process could not do namely to bring about true pure genuine selflessness and so he went out to the Streets of London again this guy came out of nowhere he had no friends no one knew who he was and he began helping helpless uh homeless people homeless people drunks people living sort of down and out in the streets it began by you know saying hello my name is George here's a here's a pound here's a sandwich it graduated to him inviting many many homeless people into his home and in the end uh this is George in the fall of 1974 in London already down to Skin and Bones he had nothing he was very glad for it because what it show what it meant to him was that indeed the spirit could transcend what nature could produce um finally though the story is not a very happy one um he could not explain to himself whether his own motivations of selflessness were not really self-interested and this inability finished him off and he uh ended his life tragically in a squat in kentstown in London in the winter of 1975 this is a photo that I took of his grave in in 2008 now this isn't his grave his grave is here in the brush so he died completely Anonymous no tombstone until this very day now the reason I bring the example of George price is because his story Story shows and in fact when you look at the history of attempts to solve the problem of altruism when it comes to human beings to try to under try to use what we know from nature in order to understand our own deep motivations it's clear that we often this is just the case it's a fact we often fall into two very very sort of deep biases or fallacies one of them is the naturalistic fallacy which is basically to the naturalistic fallacy which was explained by David y already in the 18th century is to confuse that which is with that that ought to be which ought to be so a kind of category confusion the second one is originalism which is basically to say if I've understood the origin of something then I've understood that something and the fact of the matter is that scientists trying to work on the origin of altruism throughout ever since Darwin and including until this day often fall into these two fallacies now we have actually someone in the audience uh who was responsible for this paper up here and I'd like you to train your your train your your eyes on this uh today the reason why this is important is because George Price died in 1975 but the the sort of the search for the origins of kindness continue and they continue in full force and science uses a battery of different tools to try to locate kindness uh one of the tools that we use today is genetics and in a study that was actually conducted in this University uh you take a bunch of students and you give them 100 shekels or something like that and you say okay you have a oneoff non iterated uh meeting with a stranger and you can do whatever you want with this 100 you can give them the whole 100 give them 70 give them 50 give them 20 give nothing at all and then you tabulate the results of the behavior and then you take a swab from these these people's mouth and you genotype them you look for certain genetic markers that might be in correlation genetic markers that we know that play some kind of role in what is called say pro-social behavior in rats okay these are genetic markers in this in this particular case that have to do with uh a molecule called vasoprin or oxytocin I can't remember which one oxytocin um another another picture that I want you to look at this I took at Stanford some time ago at a place called the center for compassion and altruism research at Stanford University a lot of money going into this there they try to actually locate the place in the brain which is responsible for uh for altruism uh with the help of tools like fmri now this is this is the the photo of a brain of a Tibetan monk because we all know that Tibetan Monks are all that all that more altruistic than the rest of us now the reason I mention these things is because these type of these are very interesting results right but they're also incredibly reductive and they make it very easy to fall into one of the biases either of the naturalistic bias or the the bi the bias of or originalism and I'm going to end with this I mean when we think about altruism in humans the real problem that we we grapple with individually and which obviously George price himself grappled with is a problem that that Aristotle himself pointed his finger at many years ago and that is that the love we feel for others stems from the love we feel for ourselves how can you know when you do when you perform some kind of uh act of kindness towards a fellow human being whether you're doing it because you really want to help that human being or because you get something out of it there's some kind of disguised self-interest it doesn't have to be disguised and it doesn't have to be conscious by the way it could be some visceral feeling some some bodily reaction um well that's a very good question and I want to end with the thought that in trying to think about that question we might not have a better guy than this man behind me who was a tortured Soul himself wienstein who said that even after we've answered all the possible scientific questions that we can posit we still will have not scratched the true problems of humanity and at this point there will be no more questions left and that is precisely the answer so I think that the altruism is a kind of problem um that lives very much at the Nexus between science and Society biology and evolution and and culture um and at these type of very sort of sensitive and important next nexuses um we have to remember the the the very Sage words of of wienstein when George price killed himself Bill Hamilton who was the guy who I told you before was the the man responsible for formalizing the idea of kin selection uh he loved him very much he was one of the only people in the world who understood what a genius this man was and how important his equation explaining the origins of kindness was and he fought his way into the squat after George died he actually fought his way into the squat and in the in the in the there was a sort of bloody lolium floor um where the body had been found he found a little scrap of paper that was written in George Price's handwriting and this is what it said men and women have always yearned for understanding compassion forgiveness and deeds of loving kindness from their fellow men but often they've been sadly disappointed and today more than ever in a world toward by strife and dissension the crying need is for a real demonstration of love you see love would pour the oil of quietness upon the troubled waters of Human Relationships heal the ugly wounds of strife and contention and bring together those separated by hatred jealousy and selfishness I think that the case of George price who really is responsible for for a formalization which is our best crack until this very day at the Dynamics of natural selection and within that within that Dynamic of the evolution of a trait like altruism um I think it's clear that the kind of love that he's talking about here is something that cannot be fit on a mathematical equation and that's something that we should be very all be very very happy about thank you very much