Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist and science writer, has a piece in The Atlantic this month about evolution and altruism. Alas, you have to be a subscriber to read it. But The Atlantic’s site has posted an interview with her about the topic. Here’s a snip:
I find it thought-provoking that you describe altruism as a kind of primal urge, not a rational behavior but a basic instinct like lust.
I think it is primal. Evolutionary biologists get very excited about things like suicide because if you commit suicide before you ever have offspring, your genes get removed from the population. In terms of cooperation, helping somebody else raise their own children and never having your own is a kind of genetic suicide, so evolutionary biologists get very excited about that. The question is, from a genetic perspective, why do these small acts of niceness happen?
I think its part of the evolution of social groupings. But maybe it has a bigger benefit, or maybe it just makes the creature feel good. Certainly our conscious explanation for why we do things isnt usually that it allows us to have more children. Our conscious explanation is that we get a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling. And maybe baboons get warm, fuzzy feelings.
Is there a way to study the brain or nervous system of a primate and figure out whether he or she is actually experiencing a warm, fuzzy feeling?
It would be wonderful to be able to look into the thought processes of a chimpanzee. Brain scans are all the rage in humans right now, and yet, still, theyre pretty crude. We can see that blood flow increases to a particular brain area, and we make the assumption that if blood flow is increasing there, theres more happening there. But thats not the same as knowing what somebody is thinking.
In any case, this is a very complex area, the question of altruism. To a psychologist, I gather, if you get the warm, fuzzy feeling, youre not being altruistic, because you actually enjoyed it. So to a psychologist, somebody is only being altruistic if they do something for somebody else and they dont enjoy it. I think thats a rather stringent definition, myself. I think you should be able to enjoy it.
And certainly in evolutionary terms, that would be the proximate mechanism. The fact that you enjoy helping somebody would be what mediates the activitythe sort of hormonal feedback that you get from an old woman smiling at you after you help her across the street or whatever.
-Greg Dahlmann