Lee Dugatkin is a professor at the University of Louisville and the author of "The Altruism Equation," who has been researching the nature of goodness in people and animals alike for 20 years.
As an aside, he says he feels like a kid in the conceptual candy store (my paraphrase), saying "that everywhere he looks, there's an idea he likes." He urges the audience to tell everyone they know about what's happening in Louisville.
(Photo credit: Geoff Oliver Bugbee / www.geoffbugbee.com)
"In all good adventures, there is a mystery." In this case it's the question, "what is the nature of altruism?"
He'll be sharing one main idea from his field, evolutionary biology.
Showing a video of a squirrel alarming his neighbors to the predator nearby, he rhetorically asks why the squirrel exposes himself to danger for the benefit of other squirrels. If evolution is the tale of survival, why has this self-sacrificing behavior emerged?
Altruism is not restricted to mammals, he suggests. Even slime mold, single celled creatures, cluster together to form a slug in times of peril and move as one.
He shows a video of the production of "fruiting bodies" in slime mold in which other slime-mold "stalks" ladder themselves, which, crucially, will not allow themselves to reproduce, so that the rest of the might survive - even though there is no nervous system, no brain, it's an altruistic act.
In Darwin's Origin of Species, the problem of altruism is one of the problems Darwin struggled most with. Why, for example, does the Honey Bee sting kill the bee? How could evolution, Dugatkin asks, develop a trait that, "when expressed, you die?" The answer, he suggests is that the bee is protecting the hive, its "blood relatives."
Darwin believed it might be an answer to that question: Because of that bee's action, it might be directly responsible for another generation of its close genetic material.
Debate over an Idea
Beginning in 1880, Aldous Huxley and Prince Peter Kropotkin argued for the next 100 years over this idea of altruism, of "blood kinship." Huxley, who anointed himself "Darwins' Bulldog" because of his defense of the blood relatedness, stressed the idea.
Kropotikin, who would become a single-minded and famous naturalist in virtual self-exile in Siberia, disagreed with that entire idea. He saw altruism everywhere, but does to believe it has anything to do with blood relations. Because of his anarchical views, its hard not to image that these views sneaked into his biology.
Eighty year later, W.D. Hamilton picks up this debate. Shunned by anthropologists, who resisted even the investigation he almost gives up on an explanation for altruism. But in mathematical economics he found refuge for the idea, which ultimately leads to a modern theory of altruism. At the heart of his mathematics is an expression of closeness, or genetic relatedness, of a group.
The equations he developed measure 1) the cost to the altruist 2) how likely is he or she to suffer as a result of the action and 3) how beneficial the result is.
The bottom line is that if you know these three things, you can measure the likelihood of altruism of evolving in that population. Dugatkin displays "Hamilton's Rule" on the screen.
Using this test on Honey Bee's, he explains that the stinging bees are highly related females, whereas the males are not. Turning to another species, the Naked Mole Rat is THE most highly related mammal, and as a result, all sorts of altruistic behaviors are observed.
In terms of human altruism, there are some caveats: reciprocity in humans is also extremely important. But even when accounting for human reciprocity and kinship, evolutionary biologists do not have complete theories for altruism in humans, he adds.
Altruism can be measured in the question "who would you give stuff too?" It can also be partly driven by genetics itself. Friendly, affiliative behavior can also be associated with a particular gene, which he names and which can be physically measured. That length also has some bearing on altruistic behavior.
Genetics, he stresses, is part, but by no means all, of a very complicated human picture of altruism.
Concluding, he says that by looking at nature, "we can increase our sample size," we can discover underlying themes, we can develop data that bears up under scrutiny, and we can share that with talented people who can encourage altruism in society.
In Q&A he suggests that "false kinship" is preserved in all sorts of human associations, ranging from sports teams to religious faith.
In answer to another question, he wryly observes that theories, at some level, remove altruism from altruism act. Biology hasn't yet been able to model the simple feeling of being satisfied by the good deed itself.
Wayne
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