Of Darwin, Jesus, and the Tragedy of the Commons: Is there Justice in Evolution?

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Notes

1. Stephen Jay Gould, “Nonoverlapping Magisteria,” Natural History 106 (March 1997): 16–22.

2. Price’s most important discovery in mathematical biology was an equation providing a general explanation of natural selection, including various biological traits like left-handedness, red hair, or height. Harman explains “covariance” as follows: “Say there is a group of ten people with different heights, and a second group is formed, with the same number of people but a different sample of heights. To do this you are allowed to take only the heights that existed in the first group, but in a different proportion. Say the average height of the first group is 5.5 feet. How best to predict the average height of the second group? The answer is intuitively simple: The average height of the new group would be determined by the relationship between the height of each individual and the number of ‘copies’ made of that individual in the second group, divided by the average number of copies. Scientifically speaking, that relationship is called ‘covariance’” (207).

3. “A meme should be regarded as a unit of information residing in the brain… just as genetic information is stored in the DNA. Its phenotypic effects, in contrast, are its consequences in the outside world. The phenotypic effects of a meme may be in the form of words, music, visual images, styles of clothing, facial or hand gestures, skills such as opening milk bottles in [British] tits, or panning wheat in Japanese macaques. They are the outward and visible (audible, etc.)

manifestations of memes within the brain.” Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 109.

4. For definitions of the terms “replicator” and “vehicle,” see Dawkins, Extended Phenotype, 83 and 114 respectively.

5. Charles Darwin, “The Descent of Man, in Selection and Relation to Sex” (1871), in From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin, ed. Edward O. Wilson (New York: Norton, 2006), 765–1248.

6. See Harman, The Price of Altruism, 23.

7. As stories over beer are inclined to vary, Harman notes (394, n. 63), this one, told by biologist John Maynard-Smith about his colleagues on an outing to the (once upon a time) Orange Tree pub off Euston Road, may be mistaken: the comic insight reported is that of William D. “Bill” Hamilton, according to the latter’s peeved recollection.

8. Harman, The Price of Altruism, 82; Jonah Lehrer, “Kin and Kind: A Fight about the Genetics of Altruism,” New Yorker, 5 March 2012, 36.

9. W. D. Hamilton. “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior, 1 and 2,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 7 (1964): 1.1.

10. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Dawkins writes, for example: “Or does natural selection, as I urge instead here, choose between genes? In this case, we should not be surprised to find individual organisms behaving altruistically ‘for the good of the genes’, for example by feeding and protecting kin who are likely to share copies of the same genes. Such kin altruism is only one way in which gene selfishness can translate itself into individual altruism” (8).

11. See Lehrer, “Kin and Kind,” 36–37, for a vivid account of Hamilton’s legacy in Wilson’s work.

12. Harman, The Price of Altruism, 200.

13. George Price, “Antlers, Intraspecific Combat, and Altruism” (unpublished), British Library George Price Correspondence, 1–32. See Harman, “Birth of the First ESS,” 3; The Price of Altruism, 202–9.

14. George Price and John Maynard Smith, “The Logic of Animal Conflict,” Nature 246 (November 1973): 15–18.

15. Jon von Neumann and Oscar Morgenster, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944).

16. Harman, The Price of Altruism, 119.

17. William D. Hamilton, “Extraordinary Sex Ratios,” Science 156 (1967): 477–88.

18. See Oren Harman, “Birth of the First ESS: George Price, John Maynard Smith, and the Discovery of the Lost ‘Antlers’ Paper” Journal of Experimental Zoology (MOL. DEV. EVOL.) 316 (2011): 1–9.

19. Garret Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, N.S. 162 (1968): 1243–48.

20. Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” 1244.

21. Harman, The Price of Altruism, 202–3.

22. Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” 1244.

23. Harman, The Price of Altruism, 208.

24. Joan Roughgarden, The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009).

25. Immanuel Kant, “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals,” in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), secs.4.429–4.30, 80. Kant goes on to give examples of the problems raised by the traditional moral rule: “for many a man would gladly agree that others should not benefit him if only he might be excused for showing them beneficence, and finally it does not contain the ground of duties owed to others; for a criminal would argue on this ground against the judge punishing him, and so forth.”

26. Charles Darwin, “The Origin of Species” (1859), in From So Simple a Beginning, 437–760.

27. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology (London: Williams & Norgate, 1864), 444.

28. Herbert Spencer, “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” The Westminster Review 67 (April 1857): selections, 445–47, 451, 454–56, 464–65; Modern History Sourcebook: “Herbert Spencer: Social Darwinism, 1857,” paragraph 3, at: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/spencer-darwin.asp.

29. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 315.

30. Roughgarden, The Genial Gene, 3–5.

31. Roughgarden, Genial Gene, 13.

32. Mary Jane West-Eberhard, Developmental Plasticity in Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 28. Cited by Eva Jablonka in “Genes as Followers in Evolution—A Post-synthesis Synthesis? A review of Mary Jane West-Eberhard, Developmental Plasticity and Evolution, 2003,” Biology and Philosophy 21 (2006): 143–54. For a discussion of group selection as the product of individual interests and adaptations, see Samir Okasha, “Why Won’t the Group Selection Controversy Go Away?” British Journal of Philosophy of Science 52 (2001): 25–50, cited along with other scholarly literature by Harman in The Price of Altruism.

33. Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 1.

34. Jablonka and Lamb, Four Dimensions, 356.

35. Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of the Earth (New York: Norton, 2012), 54.

36. Gregory Bateson, “Form, Substance, Difference” (1970), Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1987), 454–71, 456–57.

37. Martin A. Nowak1, Corina E. Tarnital, and Edward O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Eusociality,” Nature 466 (26 August 2010): 1057–62.

38. Lehrer, “Kin and Kind,” 40–41.

39. Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: Heinemann, 1902; rpt., Charleston, SC: Forgotten Books, 2008), 5.

40. Thomas Henry Huxley, “The Struggle for Existence and Other Essays” (London, 1894), 202–18; rpt., Internet History Sourcebook, paragraph 2 at: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1888thhuxley-struggle.asp.

41. Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), and On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). See Lehrer, “Kin and Kind,” 39–40, for this phase of Wilson’s controversial ascent to fame.

42. Lehrer, “Kin and Kind,” 42.

43. See Harman, The Price of Altruism, 47–57.

44. See Harman, The Price of Altruism, 256.

45. See Harman, The Price of Altruism, 238. George apparently did not recall his childhood perceptions of his father’s religion.

46. Harman, The Price of Altruism, 257–81; George Price to Kathleen Price, 24 March 1973, cited in Harman, The Price of Altruism, 276.

47. Harman, The Price of Altruism, 335, 60.

48. G. E. Bentley, Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 19; for the original citation of this vision, see Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake (London: Macmillan, 1880), vol. 1, 7. Bentley notes, “Gilchrist says his authority is Blake himself (‘as he will in after years relate’) but the story probably came from Catherine Blake and [artist Frederick] Tatham” (20 n.).

49. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969).

50. See Leo Tolstoy, What I Believe, trans. C. Popoff (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2010).

51. Quoted in Harman, The Price of Altruism, 275.

52. Interview with Wilson reported in Lehrer, “Kin and Kind,” 42. Note that Wilson, even in his idealism, still uses the mechanistic language of “force” to describe the sources of human conduct.