Altruism vs. Selfishness
Evolution helps explain all behaviors.The idea that evolution explains selfishness well and altruism poorly is so dead that it is beginning to smell. Can we please bury it now? Evolution explains the full range of behaviors, from extreme selfishness to extreme altruism. What evolves in any particular case depends upon the underlying environmental conditions, which are fairly well specified by now. No one should be surprised anymore by the raw fact that kindness exists in nature. The frontier of science has moved on to a more refined set of questions.Altruism is only locally disadvantageous.Darwin clearly understood the fundamental problem associated with the evolution of altruism: It is locally disadvantageous. Place an altruist and a selfish individual next to each other and the selfish individual wins. How can a behavior evolve in the total population when it is never at a local advantage?Darwin also clearly understood the nature of the solution: Altruism is advantageous at a larger scale. Groups of altruists out-compete groups of non-altruists, even if altruism is selectively disadvantageous within each group. This is the theory of multilevel selection, in which different traits are favored at different levels. The term multilevel selection wasn’t coined until later, but the whole point of group selection theory was to solve the problem posed by a conflict between levels of selection.
