Kin And Kind: A Comparative Analysis

This week’s READ IT assignment was composed of several papers (2 journal articles and the first chapter of a book) that appear to shed light on the origins of altruism. The article “Kin and Kind” by Jonah Lehrer compiled the insights of several evolutionary biologists in order to understand the natural tendency of some species, including humans, to behave altruistically. Dacher Keltner on the other hand approaches altruism from a psychological standpoint, looking primarily at the effect that it has on individual and societal health. Finally, List and Samak share their findings about the presence of altruism in young children, which suggest that altruism is not purely a learned behavior. The complementary nature of these three works grants us

an interesting perspective on the nature of altruism.
“Kin and Kind” traces evolutionary biology’s attempt to explain altruistic behavior back to the development of the theory of inclusive fitness.

This modified version of Darwin’s theory states that an animal is not only interested in passing on its’ own genes, but the genes of its’ close relatives. Early work on the behavior of ants by E.O. Wilson seemed to confirm this, as closely related sister ants (as well as other haplodiploids like bees) exhibited a large degree of eusociality. However, the lack of eusocial behavior in some haplodiploids, like termites, led Wilson, Nowak, and Tarnita to revise the theory of inclusive fitness in their paper “The Evolution of Eusociality”. This paper, which rested on the widely dismissed notion of group selection, met harsh criticism from the scientific community. Despite this pushback the concept of group selection, an idea that suggests that altruistic behavior developed despite its’ harm to the individual because it helped to sustain the group, seems to be at least partially backed by work outside the field of evolutionary

biology.
One of these seemingly supporting works is Keltner’s Born to Be Good, which looks at altruism through a psychological lens. In chapter 1 of this book Keltner champions what she calls “jen science” as a method to measure happiness. She suggests that the Jen Ratio, a technique that puts the positive things that people bring to a situation over the negative one, is an effective index of individual and societal happiness. According to Keltner, studies indicate that people and nations with high Jen ratios have a higher degree of satisfaction and happiness than those with low Jen ratios. Keeping in mind that negative and positive emotions likely developed through evolution as a sort of stop/go indicator, these findings appear to back the idea of group selection. Basically, if humans experience positive emotions when they are kind to others, then it may be true that our success as a species is a direct result of an evolutionary advantage stemming from a tendency to help one another.
The third paper from this week’s READ IT, Exploring the Origins of Charitable Acts, appears to support the notion that human beings do in fact have a natural tendency to help each other.

In their experiment, List and Samark put 122 young children through several versions of the dictator game, where they were either paired with another child anonymously or with a teddy bear. The “dictator” would either have a magic box or a normal box in front of them in which they could put any number of their allotted marshmallows. It was explained to the children that the magic box would transform their marshmallows into cotton balls, which only teddy bears could eat, and that the regular box would not transform them, meaning that only a child could eat them. In addition to this, two baseline conditions (one magic, one regular) were tested. In these baseline conditions whatever was put in the box would go straight into the garbage. In this way List and Samak managed to isolate pure altruism from what they call the “warm glow” that is experienced from the act of giving. The results of this experiment found that pure altruism appears to be a “significant motivator for giving among young children”. This conclusion seems to reject the theory of inclusive fitness in favor of group selection since the children were either unrelated to their counterpart, in the case of the teddy bear, or would have had no way of knowing their relatedness to their counterpart, in the case of the anonymous

student.
The three papers from this week’s READ IT appear to lend support to the notion of group fitness, an idea which many evolutionary biologists have long dismissed. While I am certainly lacking in my knowledge of evolutionary biology, I am inclined to agree with E.O. Wilson’s belief that the idea of group fitness “may hold the key to understanding altruism.”