Altruism: The Third Alternative for Ecology and Evolution

Consider the following to be my holiday message to you. It is adapted from an essay I wrote for my website.

I recently read a book entitled The Penguin and the Leviathan, by Yochai Benkler, a leading scholar in business research. I have read many books about altruism, many of them by scientists such as Frans deWaal (The Age of Empathy), Dacher Keltner (Born to Be Good), and Martin Nowak (Super Cooperators). These books repeatedly make the point that individuals within animal species, individual humans, and businesses can profit from being nice and generous to others. Altruism, rather than violent competition, is the most important component of “the law of the jungle.” Just ask any of the chimps that deWaal has studied. The way to the top is primarily through cooperation, not violent competition. Even apes understand this. Benkler’s book is published by Crown Business, a division of a major New York publisher. Its intended audience is not science buffs but business leaders. In the title, the Penguin is Tux, the icon of Linux, whose business model is cooperation rather than top-down command, and the Leviathan is the cynical view of life presented centuries ago by Thomas Hobbes.

Benkler, though not a scientist, has done a very good job of summarizing the evolutionary science of altruism. But the thing that opened my eyes the most was that Benkler presented altruism as a third alternative for how a society could operate. The other two ways are state control and free market. We usually think that these are our only two choices. But, as Benkler explains, this is not true.

Both state control (as exemplified by dictators on the political right or the political left) and free market economics operate from the assumption that humans are fundamentally selfish. State control attempts to force people to not be selfish. The free market tries to capitalize upon those utterly selfish economic machines known as humans. But Benkler points out that altruism is a fundamental instinct of the human mind. As Michael Shermer said, it feels good to be good; humans enjoy being altruistic. Altruism motivates much of what we do.

Our only hope, from Benkler’s viewpoint, is to build our society and economic system in a way that facilitates altruism. Governments should not try to solve all social and economic problems by law and by creating big agencies; governments should be (in my words) conduits of the altruism that already exists in people’s minds. Governments should be altruism enablers. Similarly businesses should embrace altruism, appealing to their customers’ instincts to want to create a better world for everybody. Customers are selfish, but also altruistic. Customers are increasingly offended by corporations that display conspicuous selfishness; that assume the customers are merely selfish; or that use little greenwashing gimmicks to make themselves look environmentally friendly or socially altruistic. We customers are not stupid, nor are we totally selfish. We are (some of us more than others) partly altruistic and we expect our governments and businesses to also be altruistic.

Benkler makes the point that right now, when dictatorships are falling and the free market has proven ineffective enough that it has shaken the very faith of Alan Greenspan himself, is the time when altruism has a chance to influence the very structure of the economy and government. Governments and business CEOs have been good only at spending money, with disastrous consequences that nobody can ignore any longer.

Altruism, perhaps the greatest gift of evolution, is also the only way to solve our environmental problems. Neither of the other alternatives, government fiat or the profit motive by itself, have significantly deflected our worldwide momentum toward ecological disaster.

Joy to the world? Altruism? Maybe.

Are We the Inevitable Products of Mathematical Equations?

I have just finished reading Martin Nowak’s Super Cooperators, a book written with Roger Highfield. Nowak is a biomathematician at Harvard. He has spent a career designing mathematical models that demonstrate the conditions under which altruism can evolve. Altruism is when one animal is nice to another animal of the same species.

Nowak’s view of the world resonates with my spirit. He sees the natural world as full of cooperation. Cooperation is at least as important as the “survival of the fittest,” which Darwinism is often portrayed to be. I find his viewpoint inspiring just like the viewpoint of Lynn Margulis (whom Nowak hardly mentions). The fact that Nowak is a fellow devotee of the music of Gustav Mahler doesn’t hurt any either.

And some important results have emerged from Nowak’s mathematical models. I cannot summarize all of them, but one that I remember is the following. In simple, direct interactions, when a cooperator and a defector come in contact, the defector always wins. That is, the cooperator becomes a sucker for offering help that is not reciprocated. In large populations in which all the animals are equally likely to come in contact, altruism doesn’t have a chance. But in populations in which small groups can form, where animals can choose their friends, so to speak, altruistic groups can emerge. And when they do, they can beat out the pathetic defectors every time, at least temporarily. This is particularly the case in animal societies where the animals know the reputations of other animals, which is something they can do within small groups. This is, in fact, probably the most important way in which altruism evolved. It is an example of multi-level selection: selection among groups within a larger population.

However, in one sense, I consider Nowak’s work to be unrealistic. He begins the book by expressing his feeling that all of truth can be expressed precisely by mathematics. Toward the end of the book, he claims that his equations would be true anywhere in the universe. He admits that his conclusions are not too different from beliefs, such as the Golden Rule, found in traditional religions. But he still thinks he has made a monumental universal discovery. “Now, for the first time, aspects of these powerful ideas [from religion] have been quantified in experiments, captured in equations, and enshrined in science.” He seems to mean that ideas such as the Golden Rule are really true for the first time in the history of the universe as a result of his mathematical simulations.

Nowak’s mathematical approach is unrealistic because it omits all historical contingency. In Nowak’s models, animals are cooperators or defectors for logical reasons. So maybe his equations would work reliably on the planet Vulcan. But they cannot be relied upon for human behavior. The equations mirror many, but not all, aspects of human behavior. The primary historical contingency is religion. The memes of religion have parasitized the human mind to such an extent that, throughout human history, many people have considered it a religious duty, absent any benefit, and more important than life itself, to bring death and destruction to others. Nowak’s models do not include the thirst for evil that is so common in human motivation, in which loss is reward because it ensures eternal life in a heaven.