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In another case, Peony, an elderly chimpanzee who was incapacitated with arthritis, received water from younger females who collected it in their mouths and then spat it into hers. Then there’s the case of a four-year-old chimp that was close to choking after getting a rope wrapped around his neck. The oldest, most dominant male quickly ran over to the struggling youth and lifted him up with one hand before relieving the tension on the rope.
These examples seem to defy a natural world where kindness is ultimately self-serving. But while individual anecdotes are illuminating, they don’t count as evidence in a scientific argument. Fortunately, de Waal has amassed a vast compendium of peer-reviewed literature to support his position, some of which is reviewed in Michael Tomasello’s summary in the journal Nature. While de Waal doesn’t suggest an alternative framework for the evolution of empathy, his catalogue of studies and examples is a powerful antidote to that of Dawkins and the “tyranny of the selfish replicators.”
Dawkins’ perspective has been challenged, not just by the usual Christian agitators, but by biologists who don’t agree that it is an accurate picture of the natural world. SUNY–Binghampton evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson and Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson (no relation) have argued that altruism and cooperation can better be explained through multilevel selection (the idea that groups and not just individuals are important for success in the genetic game). Darwin first discussed this idea of group selection in his 1871 book The Descent of Man. Another approach has been that by Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden whose recent book The Genial Gene proposes “social selection” as an alternative to the ruthless competitive drive for individual reproductive success.
The problem with individual selection, these critics point out, is not that it’s wrong but that it’s not the full story. Dawkins’ selfish gene is ultimately a metaphor about how genes transmit themselves to the next generation, but individual animals are not completely independent agents. Members of a group are embedded within a fabric of social relations—their actions can help or hurt the survival of all individuals collectively.
So, for example, when a lioness patrols and defends the territory of her pride, while free riders in her group are content to lounge in the sun, all members of the group ultimately benefit. A pride that consisted of only selfish individuals might allow a few cunning cats to succeed temporarily, but the group as a whole wouldn’t stand a chance. Greed may be good where it comes to personal advancement, as Gordon Gekko’s character in Wall Street insists, but when no one is minding the store the whole system can collapse. Or, as Wilson and Wilson famously wrote in The Quarterly Review of Biology: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”
In this same way, de Waal argues that the evolution of empathy is the end product of natural selection’s promotion of these altruistic groups. When chimpanzees help strangers attain food or when dolphins help to carry an injured comrade to safety, they are responding to an impulse that has allowed their ancestors to thrive throughout evolutionary history. “Social darwinists may disagree,” he writes, “but from a truly Darwinian perspective it is entirely logical to expect a ‘social motive’ in group-living animals, one that makes them strive for a well-functioning whole.”
Frans de Waal has emphasized an alternative to the bleak vision of our evolution and asks us all to reexamine what it means to be a primate. The reality is that other than bees and ants, primates are the most social order of the animal kingdom. De Waal’s work reveals that our evolutionary cousins show just as much of a capacity for empathy and altruism as they do for selfishness and greed.
We are the inheritors of these social skills from our primate forebears. By focusing exclusively on the selfish side of nature, are we not choosing to embrace the selfish side of ourselves? With the growing interconnection of peoples and economies on a planet faced with unprecedented dangers, the question of how best to work together for the common good is of profound practical importance. De Waal’s latest book has arrived not a minute too soon.
Eric Michael Johnson received his masters degree in primate behavior and is now pursuing his PhD in the history of science. He writes on issues of science, politics, and history at The Primate Diaries.
Originally published September 24, 2009
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