How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [104]
Moving up the Bio-Cultural Pyramid, basic psychological and social needs such as security, bonding, socialization, affiliation, acceptance, and affection evolved as mental programs to aid and reinforce cooperation and altruism, all of which facilitate genetic propagation through children. Kin altruism works indirectly—siblings and half-siblings, grand- and great-grandchildren, cousins and half-cousins, nieces and nephews, all carry portions of our genes. This is what is known as inclusive fitness, and applies to anyone who is genetically related to us. In larger communities and societies, where there is no genetic relationship, reciprocal altruism (if you scratch my back I will scratch yours) and indirect altruism (if you scratch my back now I will scratch yours later) supplements kin altruism. Inclusive fitness gives way to what we might call exclusive fitness. The natural progression of exclusive fitness may be the adoption of species altruism and bioaltruism (we will prevent extinction and destruction now for a long-term payoff), which Wilson argues in Biophilia may even have a genetic basis. But, Wilson confesses, this should probably still be grounded in self-interest arguments—my children and grandchildren will be better off in a future with abundant biodiversity and a healthy biosphere—since inclusive fitness is more powerful than exclusive fitness.
The width of the Bio-Cultural Pyramid at any point indicates the strength of ethical sentiment, and the degree to which it is under evolutionary control. The height of the pyramid at any point indicates the degree to which that ethical sentiment extends beyond our own genomes (ourselves). But the pyramid also shows that these two sets of sentiments are inversely related. The further a sentiment reaches beyond ourselves, the further it goes in the direction of helping someone genetically less related, and the less support it receives from underlying evolutionary mechanisms.
New research by philosopher Elliott Sober and biologist David Sloane Wilson, presented in their 1998 book Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior, indicates that there may have been an additional selection component in human evolution that gave rise to cooperation and altruism, and that is a modified version of group selection. This is a volatile subject among evolutionary theorists because for the past thirty years, group selection has been next to creationism as the doctrine strict Darwinians most love to hate. From George Williams’s 1966 book Adaptation and Natural Selection to Richard Alexander’s 1987 book The Biology of Moral Systems to Richard Dawkins’s several books throughout the 1990s, group selection was vilified as the pap of bleeding-heart liberals who couldn’t deal with the reality of “nature red in tooth and claw.” Michael Ghiselin’s 1974 description summed up the Darwinian literalists perspective, especially the last line:
The economy of nature is competitive from beginning to end … . The impulses that lead one animal to sacrifice himself for another turn out to have their ultimate rationale in gaining advantage over a third … . Where it is in his own interest, every organism may reasonably be expected to aid his fellows … . Yet given a full chance to act in his own interest, nothing but expediency will restrain him from brutalizing, from maiming, from murdering—his brother, his mate, his parent, or his child. Scratch an “altruist,” and watch a “hypocrite” bleed.
Sober and Wilson, through a sophisticated mathematical model and series of logical arguments, and defining a group as “a set of individuals that influence each other’s fitness with respect to a certain trait but not the