Enough of the “selfish gene,” already. It was a clever mental game, once, to imagine that genes are the ultimate units of evolution. That organisms are no more than a gene’s way of making more genes. The concept fundamentally confuses levels in biology. It implies that genes can have intent and moral perspective. The anthropomorphism is grossly misleading. Even Richard Dawkins, who originally launched the concept, now seems to acknowledge as much. When the notion was introduced, sociobiology was also new, promoting an evolutionary and genetic view of behavior. It was all too easy to consider all behavior, like genes, as “selfish.” Explanations of cooperation, “altruism,” and social reproductive behavior were reduced to genes through the concepts of inclusive fitness and kin selection. The supremacy of the individual seemed to epitomize Darwinism. These perspectives thus gradually became entrenched, and now appear as fact in virtually every textbook: another sacred bovine? Recently, however, E. O. Wilson, the prominent founder and advocate of sociobiology, has renounced kin selection in explaining societies with a single reproductive individual. The idea was that genetic relatedness could explain why some individuals did not themselves reproduce but instead helped others, their kin, reproduce similar genes. Three decades of research have shown that many cooperative breeding societies (such as termites) do not exhibit the required genetic structure of haplodiploidy. Moreover, many species that do (including sawflies and horntails) are not social. The documented cases and the explanation do not align. Rather, the societies in question—from ants and honeybees to beetles, shrimp, and naked mole rats—all seem to have nests with restricted access, guarded by just a few individuals. The social cooperation seems just an “ordinary” adaptation to certain conditions. The striking reproductive structure, Wilson now contends, is an evolutionary consequence—not a cause—of the social organization. Wilson’s dramatic turnabout illustrates a wider shift in perspective. For decades William Hamilton’s notion of kin selection largely eclipsed Robert Trivers’s concept of reciprocity as an explanation for cooperation. While the former is commonly presented in educational contexts, the latter has been nearly always absent.
The birth of kindness
