A Paradox: Human Altruism May Have Arisen in the Brutal Evolutionary Crucible of War

From the Progress-Comes-In-Strange-Ways department:    A disconcerting report published last week suggests that altruism — the unselfish concern for others lauded by countless religious- and philosophical traditions — may have been forged, like a diamond from coal, in the brutal evolutionary heat and pressure of humanity's war-like tendencies.

Background:  Individual Fitness versus Group Fitness

First, some background:  Some critics of evolutionary theory claim that human altruism simply could not have evolved in a survival-of-the-fittest environment of natural selection.   They point out that an individual who takes altruistic risks on behalf of anyone other than close kin may be putting his (or her) own particular genes at an evolutionary disadvantage. 

The woman who dies rescuing her child from peril (or her sibling or niece or nephew or cousin) is at least preserving a portion of her own genetic heritage for the future.  It's a much different story for the man who sacrifices himself to save a genetically-unrelated stranger; as far as any future offspring are concerned, he's taking his particular genetic contribution completely out of the gene pool.

And so, critics say, any genetic tendency to altruism would have died out long ago.  It hasn't.  Therefore, they say, evolution simply cannot be the way we humans came to be who we are.

This view, however, confuses individual fitness with group fitness.  Darwin himself pointed out that collaboration can give groups a leg up in gathering food and dealing with disease, bad weather, hostile neighbors, etc.  

In his must-read book Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny, author Robert Wright recounts how hunter-gatherer groups, organized as families, clans, and villages, frequently collaborate with other groups in hunting and other endeavors.  Presumably, ancestors of these groups' members figured out that collaboration was a better way of ensuring a reliable food supply, dealing with harsh winters, fighting off raiders, etc.  These ancestors passed on both their genes and their cultural practices to their descendants, who ended up being more numerous than those of the noncollaborators.

Altruism as a Signal, Promoting Time-Shifted Collaboration

Wright also describes how hunter-gatherer groups often engage in lavish gift exchanges, sharing their surpluses with other groups.   In part, he says, sharing is simply prudent social insurance against future bad times:  Eskimo whale hunters learned long ago that, after a successful hunt, a fine place to store extra meat and blubber is in the bellies of other hunters who had been less successful on that occasion and who could be expected to reciprocate when the roles were reversed.  (And other research has shown that those who fail to reciprocate are punished.)

Thus, Wright says, hunters who dealt with other hunters "altruistically" in the present had a better chance of surviving future privation, and thus of raising their offspring to reproductive age, than those who didn't practice altruism. 

Consequently, generation by generation, hunter populations became progressively dominated by individuals who were genetically- and culturally predisposed to deal altruistically with others.

Sociologist Rodney Stark, in his book The Rise of Christianity, proposes that the early Christian church had a similar competitive advantage over pagans:  Christians took care of each other.  This not only increased their individual survival fitness, it also made their Christian movement itself more attractive to potential converts, especially from vulnerable groups such as women and the poor.

Altruism thus serves as a signal, a message that the giver might be a person of good character who can be trusted.  (People and animals still use gifts for that purpose even today.)  Humans have a highly-developed ability to recognize and learn from such signals.  Over time, those signals can lead to mutual trust.  That in turn can facilitate collaboration and thus convey an evolutionary advantage.

The Great Rewarder of Collaboration:  War

And the evolutionary advantage of collaboration is almost nowhere more evident than in the life-or-death competition of war.   History offers ample proof that (other things being equal) a coherent military unit whose members work well together, and who would even die for each other if necessary, will defeat a rabble of selfish, every-man-for-himself individualists.

In humanity's earliest days, defeat in war often meant utter extinction for the losers, and thus for their genes and cultural practices.  In the December 8 issue of Science magazine ($), Samuel Bowles offers empirical estimates suggesting that "genetic differences between early human groups are likely to have been great enough so that lethal intergroup competition could account for the evolution of altruism."  

In particular, Bowles says, "[a] few archaeological sites from the late Pleistocene suggest that exceptionally lethal warfare took place ....  [T]he level of ongoing hostility indicated by these data would produce fitness effects equivalent to the extinction-repopulation scenario modeled above occurring every five to seven generations."  (Emphasis added.) 

Or as a Scientific American review ($) of Bowles's paper puts it, "the proclivity to wipe out subjected populations continued to reinforce our newly developing altruistic ways. ... History isn't just written by the winners, the people reading that history are probably their descendants." 

So:  Has War Been Part of God's Plan for Refining Humanity?

It may well be that we humans have been genetically marching ourselves up a learning curve of altruism:  rewarding those who happen to have been given genes and memes conducive to collaboration, and punishing those who don't.

In hindsight, the benefit for those of us living now is obvious.   We're the descendants of people who did learn to behave altruistically and to teach their offspring to do so, at least enough to survive wars and to reproduce themselves. 

It thus appears as though war might be one of the mechanisms of the continuing creation. 

That's a disconcerting thought.  The suffering of war, and the waste of human and material resources, are no less for those living in war-torn locales today than for those living in prehistoric times. 

It's hard to fathom that a loving God would work in that way.

Unless — as Christians believe — the world we experience in this life, with its abundant suffering and loss, is not the sum total of all we're ever going to experience in the Creation ....