The Dark Side of Doing Good

When tragedy strikes, optimists like me look for something, anything, redemptive. In the case of natural disasters - like the earthquakes that recently rocked Haiti, Chile and China - optimists can point to the outpouring of help from people around the world. Some donors, to be sure, are celebrities seeking to burnish their images, but many are anonymous folks of modest means, who can ill afford to give anything away.

Evolutionary biologists call this behavior altruism, and they’ve had enormous difficulty accounting for it in Darwinian terms. Genuine altruism involves a sacrifice of some sort: you decrease your own fitness, or reproductive prospects, to increase someone else’s. Some altruism is easily understood in terms of kin selection, which holds that under certain circumstances an individual should sacrifice his fitness for others who share a substantial portion of his genes. Kin selection explains why a female badger fights a coyote threatening to eat her offspring, and why worker bees suicidally sting a bear who wants to snack on the hive’s honey.

Asked if he would lay down his life for his brother, the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane quipped, “No, but for two brothers or eight cousins.” Of course, we don’t consciously calculate the benefits of helping a daughter or sister in this fashion. Natural selection, in a sense, did the calculations for us over many generations, and instilled in us the love and empathy that often compel us to help relatives, even if we put ourselves at risk.

But what possesses people to help unrelated strangers? The classic example of this sort of person is the Bible’s Good Samaritan. The evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers speculated in the 1970s that natural selection might have favoured Good Samaritan genes if helping strangers resulted — in the aggregate over long periods of evolutionary time — in a net benefit for altruists. Trivers called this tit-for-tat strategy reciprocal altruism. Once again, the altruist is driven by emotion, the compassionate urge to help, not rational calculation of how he will benefit.

Kin selection and reciprocal altruism, which discern selfishness lurking beneath our apparent selflessness, are disturbing enough. More disturbing still is a hypothesis recently proposed by the evolutionary biologist Samuel Bowles, who links altruism to ruthless violence. Bowles notes that for 99 per cent of our evolutionary history, or two million years, our ancestors lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers. Archaeological and ethnographic studies, he says, reveal that these Paleolithic people engaged in frequent warfare. He estimates that war killed as much as 15 per cent of the population of Paleolithic tribes, a mortality rate about 10 times great than the rate of war deaths in the twentieth century. Under these circumstances, Bowles conjectures, natural selection would favour bands stocked with males predisposed to risk their lives to protect band-mates.

I have minor misgivings about Bowles’s theory. He assumes that natural selection can promote genes that benefit whole groups, not just individuals; many biologists reject group selection. Moreover, the evidence for warfare in the Paleolithic is more tenuous than Bowles claims. But his theory makes all too much intuitive sense.

History, and current events, teem with men who in the name of their in-group - whether gang, clan, tribe, chiefdom, nation, race or religion - risk their lives in acts of violence against others. The most extreme example of a violent altruist is a suicide bomber. The evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson once wrote that if our altruism were not tempered by reason and self-interest, humans “might be eager, literally and horribly, to sacrifice themselves for their blood kin.” Today, a frightening number of people seem eager to sacrifice themselves for non-kin, for an ideology or faith or ethnic identity.

Which form of altruism will prevail? The kind that makes a man eager to fly a plane into a building or even detonate a nuclear weapon in a city filled with innocent civilians? Or the kind that compels us to send our hard-earned money to people we don’t even know in Haiti or some other distant land? The latter, I believe, because we are gradually, finally, beginning to recognise that we are all kin. We are all fundamentally related. I told you I was an optimist.

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