• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The man in question is George Williams, who has been a quiet, bookish professor of biology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook on Long Island for most of his career. He has done no memorable experiments and made no startling discovery. Yet he is the progenitor of a revolution in evolutionary biology almost as profound as Darwin’s. In 1966, irritated by Wynne-Edwards and other exponents of group selection, he spent a summer holiday writing a book about how he thought evolution worked. Called Adaptation and Natural Selection, that book still towers over biology like a Himalayan peak. It did for biology what Adam Smith had done for economics: it explained how collective effects could flow from the actions of self-interested individuals.14

In the book, Williams exposed the logical flaws in group selection with unanswerable simplicity. The few evolutionists who had stuck to individual selection all along, such as Sir Ronald Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane and Sewall Wright, were vindicated.15 The ones who had confused species and individual, like Julian Huxley, were eclipsed.16 Within a few years of Williams’s book, Wynne-Edwards was effectively defeated and almost all biologists had agreed that no creature could ever evolve the ability to help its species at the expense of itself. Only when the two interests coincided would it act selflessly.

This was disturbing. It seemed at first to be a very cruel and heartless conclusion to reach, particularly in a decade when economists were tentatively celebrating the discovery that the ideal of helping society could persuade people to pay high taxes to support welfare. Society, they said, need not be based on tempering the greed of individuals, but on appealing to their better natures. And here were biologists coming to exactly the opposite conclusion about animals, depicting a harsh world in which no animal ever sacrificed its own ambitions to the needs of the team or the group. Crocodiles would eat each other’s babies even on the brink of extinction.

Yet that was not what Williams said. He knew full well that individual animals often co-operate and that human society is not a ruthless free-for-all. But he also saw that co-operation is nearly always between close relatives – mothers and children, sister worker bees – or that it is practised where it directly or eventually benefits the individual. The exceptions are few indeed. This is because, where selfishness brings higher rewards than altruism, selfish individuals leave more descendants, so altruists inevitably become extinct. But where altruists help their relatives, they are helping those who share some of their genes, including whatever genes had caused them to be altruistic. So, without any conscious intention on the part of individuals, such genes spread.17

But Williams realized that there was one troubling exception to this pattern: sex. The traditional explanation for sex, the Vicar of Bray theory, was essentially group selectionist. It demanded that an individual altruistically share its genes with those of another individual when breeding because if it did not, the species would not innovate and would, a few hundred thousand years later, be outdone by other species that did. Sexual species, it said, were better off than asexual species.

But were sexual individuals better off than asexual ones? If not, sex could not be explained by the Williams ‘selfish’ school of thought. Therefore, either there was something wrong with the selfish theories, and true altruism could indeed emerge, or the traditional explanation of sex was wrong. And the more Williams and his allies looked, the less sense sex seemed to make for the individual, as opposed to the species.

Michael Ghiselin of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco was at the time engaged on a study of Darwin’s work and was struck by Darwin’s own insistence on the primacy of the struggle between individuals rather than the struggle between groups. But Ghiselin, too, began thinking about