Ants, altruism and self sacrifice

My Times column is on a disagreement between
Edward Wilson and Richard Dawkins about evolution:

 

I find it magnificent that a difference of opinion
about the origin of ants between two retired evolutionary
biologists, one in his eighties and one in his seventies, has made
the news. On television, the Harvard biologist EO Wilson called the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins a
“journalist”, this being apparently the lowest of insults in the
world of science; it was taken as such.

I know and admire both men but having read the relevant papers I
think that on the substantive disagreement between them Dawkins is
right. Which is just as well, I shall explain, or we would need
many more poppies for the Tower of London.

Before plunging (briefly) into the arithmetic of genetic
relatedness within ant colonies, let me first pose a simple
question: why do people care for their children? Raising children
is expensive, hard work and intermittently stressful, but most
people consider it rewarding in the end. What do they mean by
that?

Do they do it just to gratify themselves, selfishly seeking
these rewards, thus devaluing their generosity towards the
children? Hardly.

Surely it is more likely that people bear, raise and treasure
their children for the same reason that rabbits, blackbirds and
spiders care for their offspring — because they are descended from
individuals that cared for offspring. Throughout history those
people who found child rearing worth it, despite the effort, left
behind more descendants than those who did not.

I went fishing at the weekend. The salmon I was fortunate enough
to land (and release) is an extreme example. Although in good shape
when she left my hands, she will very likely die within the next
two months, exhausted by the effort and risk of reaching a stream
where she can lay her eggs. Her breeding instinct is the very
opposite of rewarding for herself. But it perpetuates her
genes.

This is a point that most critics of Richard Dawkins’s book
The Selfish Gene persist in missing: it is the
selfishness of genes that drives us to be selfless. The theory that
most creatures do things that help the survival of their genes
specifically explains and illuminates acts of genuine
generosity.

It is the very opposite of a theory that says we should be
selfish, though it does say that we are likely to be selective in
our generosity. (But we knew that.)

And here is where ants come in. Ants are not generally
altruistic. In fact they fight ants from other colonies to the
death and sometimes enslave ants of other species. Yet within a
colony, worker ants raise their sisters rather than their
daughters. Wilson thinks this is because the survival of the colony
is the main reward that drives their altruism: a theory called
“group selection”; Dawkins believes that the survival of the ants’
genes, shared by those sisters who will become future queens, is
the chief cause: a theory called “kin selection”. Cut through the
mathematics and insults and that’s the core disagreement.

Lots of good evidence supports Dawkins, or rather his late
colleague Bill Hamilton, who originated the theory of kin
selection. For instance, although the sister-rearing habit evolved
in termites and naked mole-rats as well, it appeared eight separate
times in ants, bees and wasps.

This group of insects has the peculiar trait that — because
males are produced from unfertilised eggs — females are more
similar to their sisters than their daughters so long as they share
the same father. And in all eight lineages, it appears it was already the habit in
ancestral species for queens to mate only once, ensuring this
genetic similarity.

Wilson used to buy this argument, but now he says he has
“abandoned” the theory of the selfish gene for one based on the
selective survival of competing groups. That sometimes groups
compete, or that individuals need to be in groups to thrive, is not
in doubt. But does it happen enough for creatures to develop
genetic tendencies to put the success of the group first, before
their own survival?

Wilson likes to call human beings “eusocial”, a word
normally used for ants, bees and termites that live in colonies
where the queen does all the reproducing. But for all the
“groupishness” of people, there is very little evidence that we
seek to sacrifice our own opportunities to reproduce as
individuals, let alone that our groups themselves multiply. On the
contrary, breeding is the one thing we like to do for
ourselves.

And this is why the Wilson-Dawkins disagreement is of political
relevance. “Group selection” has always been portrayed as a more
politically correct idea, implying that there is an evolutionary
tendency to general altruism in people. Gene selection has
generally seemed to be more of a right-wing idea, in which
individuals are at the mercy of the harsh calculus of the
genes.

Actually, this folk understanding is about as misleading as it
can be. Society is not built on one-sided altruism but on mutually
beneficial co-operation.

Nearly all the kind things people do in the world are done in
the name of enlightened self-interest. Think of the people who sold
you coffee, drove your train, even wrote your newspaper today. They
were paid to do so but they did things for you (and you for them).
Likewise, gene selection clearly drives the evolution of a
co-operative instinct in the human breast, and not just towards
close kin.

It can even drive a tendency to defend fellow members of the
group if the survival of the group helps to perpetuate the genes.
But group selection is a theory of competition between groups, and
that is generally known by another name in human affairs. We call
it war. If group selection were to work properly, war would mean
the total annihilation of the enemy by the victorious group.

Richard Dawkins and EO Wilson were once on the same side,
writing influential books within a year of each other in the 1970s
to explain the evolution of behaviour.

Dawkins still admires Wilson but thinks he has fallen
into error. It is a bit like when Charles Darwin chastised Alfred
Russel Wallace in the 1880s for his insistence that “a superior
intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite
direction, and for a special purpose.” To which Darwin replied,
chidingly, in a letter: “I hope you have not murdered too
completely your own and my child”.