Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others (Foundational Questions in Science) Hardcover – January 13, 2015

As a student of economics and business, I knew little of the topic discussed by David Wilson. His provocative, well reasoned explanations were at first difficult for me to grasp, but as I followed through his explanations it was as if a new view of the world emerged. I definitely plan to read more of his books.

This unassuming-looking little book contains within it some of the secrets of the human universe. It belongs among the select set of volumes that have, I feel, truly advanced my understanding of the world. I don’t know what possessed me to pick it up in the first place; and the beginning of my read was inauspicious because of the volume’s somewhat abstract and abbreviated style. But before long I realized that the book was onto something both true and fundamental (and apparently also cutting-edge). It is also fantastically thought-provoking. Let me try to convey the sense of it in my own words.

Those of us who ponder the moral or ethical state of things tend to divide up actions and motives between the selfish and the altruistic. (If the selfishness is rational or “enlightened,” then it goes by the technical name of egoism.) Obviously the former is generally frowned upon and the latter praised. Yet a modern, scientific view of the world, informed in particular by evolutionary biology, has seemed to make our view of these attitudes problematic, since selfishness in some sense seems to be what natural selection is all about. This has also been a favored view in economics ever since Adam Smith spoke of an invisible hand that, by the popular view (but not really Smith’s own, according to Wilson), transforms selfish behavior in the marketplace into the welfare of society as a whole.

In this book, David Sloan Wilson argues that modern empirical and theoretical research have demonstrated conclusively that the selfish/altruist distinction is, in his word, irrelevant (p. 113) to what really matters for human thriving. Or, more precisely, he recommends defining altruism in terms of whatever behavior tends to the welfare of one’s group or society, at risk of one’s individual welfare, regardless of the character of the motive behind the behavior.

But the central and ground-breaking point is this: Natural or cultural selection will of its own accord bring about the right mix of selfish and altruist motives by selection at a “higher level.” So what determines how many egoists and altruists there are in your group will be due, not to the effects of such attitudes on the individuals within the group, but to the survival value the mix of attitudes accords to your group relative to other groups with which yours is competing. Groups with a different mix will simply vanish by losing the intergroup competition.

This fact in turn suggests that, with sufficient knowledge of this mechanism and the will to apply that knowledge, we could intentionally structure our group to be successful, that is, at surviving. Wilson and colleagues actually put this to the test in various demonstration projects.

While I cannot recommend this book too highly, I also must mention two major shortcomings (though I still credit the book for stimulating my awareness of these very issues). One is that there is huge question begging, or maybe just question ignoring, about the nature of morality or ethics. Suppose, for example, that the only means of survival by a given group in a given set of circumstances involve inculcating x, y, and z in the populace (say, beheadings and genocides and systemic rape of the infidels by members of ISIS). Doing these things might involve courage and self-sacrifice, or not; but whatever, we could still imagine an individual member of ISIS objecting to them “though the heavens fall,” that is, even in the knowledge that refraining from their performance would likely doom his or her own group. Does Wilson have anything ethically illuminating to say about that objector?

Of course Wilson could argue that ISIS is likely to fail precisely because of its inculcation of x, y, and z. Even supposing that is a correct prediction, does it address my question? Survival, while a sine qua non of evolution, has always seemed a strange bedfellow to ethics. And yet, I certainly appreciate that whatever ethics we have, could only have been the product of evolution, since, in the nature of the case, we can only have an ethics that has “survived.” This is the sort of issue that theoretical ethicists (such as myself) get tied up in knots thinking about (and love doing so).

A second point of criticism is the big letdown of the final chapter, “Planetary Altruism.” Here I was expecting a culmination of the argument with reference to current global concerns, such as depletion of resources, overpopulation, and climate change. But there is nary a peep about these things. The chapter is short and sketchy, when it could have been spectacular.

Finally, a minor but annoying shortcoming of this edition: the layout of the notes section. You would think that after all these years a distinguished press like Yale’s would recognize how absurd it is to have a footnote refer the reader to a notes section that does not clearly identify the chapter that contains that note. As things stand, say you come across note number 7 in Chapter 5. The header of the page in the chapter does not identify the chapter by number but only by name, “Psychological Altruism.” So you then turn to the notes section in the back of the book, but there you find that all of the chapters are referred to only by number! So now you have to thumb back to the page you were reading and then to the beginning of the chapter to remind yourself of what number that chapter is. Then back to the notes section. (And as if that were not bad enough, often as not the note itself will contain a citation, which you must in turn look up in the separate bibliography section.)

The obvious and simple solution to these difficulties is to have footnotes instead of endnotes (as well as in-text citations to sources in a separate bibliography). But at the very least, if for some reason the notes need to be bunched at the end, either have consecutive footnumbering through the whole book rather than chapter by chapter, or else make sure the page headings clearly coordinate between main text and notes section.

(I am abashed to admit that one of my own books suffers from the same flaw. What is the problem with these publishers??)

I’ve wondered about altruism for decades--this, at long last, is the book I’ve been searching for to help me better understand how to truly help others. David Sloan Wilson is a remarkable scientist, and here he is in top form in framing the vital issue of altruism in paradigm-shifting fashion.

This elegant, concise volume contains many surprises. It’s not commonly known, for example, that religions do NOT generally draw on altruism at the level of thoughts and feelings to motivate people’s altruism. Instead, religions promote altruism through actions. (p. 89) In other words, the old saying “It’s the thought that counts” gets things backwards. Careful research, well-explained by Wilson’s to-the-point descriptions, reveals that it’s the act that counts. (Let that be a lesson to us.)

Wilson approaches his understanding of altruism through the prism of evolutionary theory, which provides a dramatic, scientifically grounded new perspective. This is important—often, we imagine we know what works in helping others, and so we set up frameworks for examining altruism that serve as a bulwark for our own beliefs. Evolutionary theory provides a much broader, and in surprising ways, more compassionate way of viewing and understanding altruism that also allows us to form models of practical, workable, “organism level” (p. 144) altruism. In fact, approaching matters through evolutionary perspectives can allow us to see symbolic thought itself as a nongenetic inheritance system (pp. 54-56).

August Comte coined the word altruism in the mid-1800s while he was trying to create a moral system without belief in God. As Wilson notes apropos Comte: “Happiness and progress were…a matter of promoting universal altruism through a purely scientific religion of humanity.” (p. 90). Comte’s experiment, sadly, was a failure. This isn’t at all to say that religion is the sine qua non for altruism—but rather, that there is something deeper than meets the eye in social structures that promote altruism.

These “deeper than meets the eye” aspects of altruism are carefully explored in the 150 beautifully written pages of this book. We get a succinct and pithy overview of one of evolutionary biology’s long-time controversies—that of group selection. As Wilson neatly summarizes: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.” (p. 23). The wonderfully consilient scientific paradigm of equivalence is put forth to help explain the controversy. It seems in science that some seemingly divergent perspectives can ultimately be proven to be different sides of the same coin.

This book leaves us with an outstanding framework to help us understand one of the greatest issues of modern times—how to organize societies, and not necessarily from top down, so they function well at larger and larger scales.

Wilson asks in the title of his provocative volume—Does Altruism Exist? I think you’ll be more than satisfied with his answer.

Wilson once again makes the case for group selection as an evolutionary process and includes an angry response to Dawkin's etal. continued preference for individual selection. Rereading The Selfish Gene and then Does Altruism Exist? makes for a rewarding study.

This is a book to read and discuss with your community at large. The implications are formidable.

Excellent Overview of Evolutionary Biology for the non academic

This is a dense and important book. For my review in length, see my piece in a recnt issue of The Humanist magazine.

great book