To use the language of Maynard Smith, the altruistic adoption 'strategy' is not an evolutionarily stable strategy. It is unstable in the sense that it can be bettered by a rival selfish strategy of laying more than one's fair share of eggs, and then refusing to sit on them. This latter selfish strategy is in its turn unstable, because the altruistic strategy which it exploits is unstable, and will disappear. The only evolutionarily stable strategy for a guillemot is to recognize its own egg, and sit exclusively on its own egg, and this is exactly what happens.
The song-bird species that are parasitized by cuckoos have fought back, not in this case by learning the appearance of their own eggs, but by discriminating instinctively in favour of eggs with the species-typical markings. Since they are not in danger of being parasitized by members of their own species, this is effective. But the cuckoos have retaliated in their turn by making their eggs more and more like those of the host species in colour, size, and markings. This is an example of a lie, and it often works. The result of this evolutionary arms race has been a remarkable perfection of mimicry on the part of the cuckoo eggs. We may suppose that a proportion of cuckoo eggs and chicks are 'found out', and those that are not found out are the ones who live to lay the next generation of cuckoo eggs. So genes for more effective deception spread through the cuckoo gene pool. Similarly, those host birds with eyes sharp enough to detect any slight imperfection in the cuckoo eggs' mimicry are the ones that contribute most to their own gene pool. Thus sharp and sceptical eyes are passed on to their next generation. This is a good example of how natural selection can sharpen up active discrimination, in this case discrimination against another species whose members are doing their best to foil the discriminators.
Now let us return to the comparison between an animal's 'estimate' of its kinship with other members of its group, and the corresponding estimate of an expert field naturalist. Brian Bertram has spent many years studying the biology of lions in the Serengeti National Park. On the basis of his knowledge of their reproductive habits, he has estimated the average relatedness between individuals in a typical lion pride. The facts that he uses to make his estimates are things like this. A typical pride consists of seven adult females who are its more permanent members, and two adult males who are itinerant. About half the adult females give birth as a batch at the same time, and rear their cubs together so that it is difficult to tell which cub belongs to whom. The typical litter size is three cubs. The fathering of litters is shared equally between the adult males in the pride. Young females remain in the pride and replace old females who die or leave. Young males are driven out when adolescent. When they grow up, they wander around from pride to pride in small related gangs or pairs, and are unlikely to return to their original family.
Using these and other assumptions, you can see that it would be possible to compute an average figure for the relatedness of two individuals from a typical lion pride. Bertram arrives at a figure of 0.22 for a pair of randomly chosen males, and 0.15 for a pair of females. That is to say, males within a pride are on average slightly less close than half brothers, and females slightly closer than first cousins.
Now, of course, any particular pair of individuals might be full brothers, but Bertram had no way of knowing this, and it is a fair bet that the lions did not know it either. On the other hand, the average figures that Bertram estimated are available to the lions themselves
in a certain sense. If these figures really are typical for an average lion pride, then any gene that predisposed males to behave towards other males as if they were nearly half brothers would have positive survival value. Any gene that went too far and made males behave in a friendly way more appropriate to full brothers would on average be penalized, as would a gene for not being friendly enough, say treating other males like second cousins. If the facts of lion life are as Bertram says, and, just as important, if they have been like that for a large number of generations, then we may expect that natural selection will have favoured a degree of altruism appropriate to the average degree of relatedness in a typical pride. This is what I meant when I said that the kinship estimates of animal and of good naturalist might end up rather the same.
So we conclude that the 'true' relatedness may be less important in the evolution of altruism than the best estimate of relatedness that animals can get. This fact is probably a key to understanding why parental care is so much more common and more devoted than brother/sister altruism in nature, and also why animals may value themselves more highly even than several brothers. Briefly, what I am saying is that, in addition to the index of relatedness, we should consider something like an index of 'certainty'. Although the parent/ child relationship is no closer genetically than the brother/sister relationship, its certainty is greater. It is normally possible to be much more certain who your children are than who your brothers are. And you can be more certain still who you yourself are!
We considered cheaters among guillemots, and we shall have more to say about liars and cheaters and exploiters in following chapters. In a world where other individuals are constantly on the alert for opportunities to exploit kin-selected altruism, and use it for their own ends, a survival machine has to consider who it can trust, who it can be really sure of. If B is really my baby brother, then I should care for him up to half as much as I care for myself, and fully as much as I care for my own child. But can I be as sure of him as I can of my own child? How do I know he is my baby brother?
If C is my identical twin, then I should care for him twice as much as I care for any of my children, indeed I should value his life no less than my own. But can I be sure of him? He looks like me to be sure, but it could be that we just happen to share the genes for facial features. No, I will not give up my life for him, because although it is possible that he bears 100 per cent of my genes, I absolutely know that I contain 100 per cent of my genes, so I am worth more to me than he is. I am the only individual that any one of my selfish genes can be sure of. And although ideally a gene for individual selfishness could be displaced by a rival gene for altruistically saving at least one identical twin, two children or brothers, or at least four grandchildren etc., the gene for individual selfishness has the enormous advantage of certainty of individual identity. The rival kin-altruistic gene runs the risk of making mistakes of identity, either genuinely accidental, or deliberately engineered by cheats and parasites. We therefore must expect individual selfishness in nature, to an extent greater than would be predicted by considerations of genetic relatedness alone.
In many species a mother can be more sure of her young than a father can. The mother lays the visible, tangible egg, or bears the child. She has a good chance of knowing for certain the bearers of her own genes. The poor father is much more vulnerable to deception. It is therefore to be expected that fathers will put less effort than mothers into caring for young. We shall see that there are other reasons to expect the same thing, in the chapter on the Battle of the Sexes (Chapter 9). Similarly, maternal grandmothers can be more sure of their grandchildren than paternal grandmothers can, and might be expected to show more altruism than paternal grandmothers. This is because they can be sure of their daughter's children, but their son may have been cuckolded. Maternal grandfathers are just as sure of their grandchildren as paternal grandmothers are, since both can reckon on one generation of certainty and one generation of uncertainty. Similarly, uncles on the mother's side should be more interested in the welfare of nephews and nieces than uncles on the father's side, and in general should be just as altruistic as aunts are. Indeed in a society with a high degree of marital infidelity, maternal uncles should be more altruistic than 'fathers' since they have more grounds for confidence in their relatedness to the child. They know that the child's mother is at least their half-sister. The 'legal' father knows nothing. I do not know of any evidence bearing on these predictions, but I offer them in the hope that others may, or may start looking for evidence. In particular, perhaps social anthropologists might have i
nteresting things to say.
Returning to the fact that parental altruism is more common than fraternal altruism, it does seem reasonable to explain this in terms of the 'identification problem'. But this does not explain the fundamental asymmetry in the parent/child relationship itself. Parents care more for their children than children do for their parents, although the genetic relationship is symmetrical, and certainty of relatedness is just as great both ways. One reason is that parents are in a better practical position to help their young, being older and more competent at the business of living. Even if a baby wanted to feed its parents, it is not well equipped to do so in practice.
There is another asymmetry in the parent/child relationship which does not apply to the brother/sister one. Children are always younger than their parents. This often, though not always means they have a longer expectation of life. As I emphasized above, expectation of life is an important variable which, in the best of all possible worlds, should enter into an animal's 'calculation' when it is 'deciding' whether to behave altruistically or not. In a species in which children have a longer average life expectancy than parents, any gene for child altruism would be labouring under a disadvantage. It would be engineering altruistic self-sacrifice for the benefit of individuals who are nearer to dying of old age than the altruist itself. A gene for parent altruism, on the other hand, would have a corresponding advantage as far as the life-expectancy terms in the equation were concerned.
One sometimes hears it said that kin selection is all very well as a theory, but there are few examples of its working in practice. This criticism can only be made by someone who does not understand what kin selection means. The truth is that all examples of child-protection and parental care, and all associated bodily organs, milk-secreting glands, kangaroo pouches, and so on, are examples of the working in nature of the kin-selection principle. The critics are of course familiar with the widespread existence of parental care, but they fail to understand that parental care is no less an example of kin selection than brother/sister altruism. When they say they want examples, they mean that they want examples other than parental care, and it is true that such examples are less common. I have suggested reasons why this might be so. I could have gone out of my way to quote examples of brother/sister altruism-there are in fact quite a few. But I don't want to do this, because it would reinforce the erroneous idea (favoured, as we have seen, by Wilson) that kin selection is specifically about relationships other than the parent/ child relationship.
Family planning
It is easy to see why some people have wanted to separate parental care from the other kinds of kin-selected altruism. Parental care looks like an integral part of reproduction whereas, for example, altruism toward a nephew is not. I think there really is an important distinction hidden here, but that people have mistaken what the distinction is. They have put reproduction and parental care on one side, and other sorts of altruism on the other. But I wish to make a distinction between bringing new individuals into the world, on the one hand, and caring for existing individuals on the other. I shall call these two activities respectively child-bearing and child-caring. An individual survival machine has to make two quite different sorts of decisions, caring decisions and bearing decisions. I use the word decision to mean unconscious strategic move. The caring decisions are of this form: 'There is a child; its degree of relatedness to me is so and so; its chances of dying if I do not feed it are such and such; shall I feed it?' Bearing decisions, on the other hand, are like this: 'Shall I take whatever steps are necessary in order to bring a new individual into the world; shall I reproduce?' To some extent, caring and bearing are bound to compete with each other for an individual's time and other resources: the individual may have to make a choice: 'Shall I care for this child or shall I bear a new one?'
Depending on the ecological details of the species, various mixes of caring and bearing strategies can be evolutionarily stable. The one thing that cannot be evolutionarily stable is a pure caring strategy. If all individuals devoted themselves to caring for existing children to such an extent that they never brought any new ones into the world, the population would quickly become invaded by mutant individuals who specialized in bearing. Caring can only be evolutionarily stable as part of a mixed strategy-at least some bearing has to go on.
The reason this error has grown up is largely historical. The evolutionary advantage of parental care is so obvious that we did not have to wait for Hamilton to point it out It has been understood ever since Darwin. When Hamilton demonstrated the genetic equivalence of other relationships, and their evolutionary significance, he naturally had to lay stress on these other relationships. In particular, he drew examples from the social insects such as ants and bees, in which the sister/sister relationship is particularly important, as we shall see in a later chapter. I have even heard people say that they thought Hamilton's theory applied only to the social insects!
If anybody does not want to admit that parental care is an example of kin selection in action, then the onus is on him to formulate a general theory of natural selection that predicts parental altruism, but that does not predict altruism between collateral kin. I think he will fail.
The species with which we are most familiar-mammals and birds-tend to be great carers. A decision to bear a new child is usually followed by a decision to care for it. It is because bearing and caring so often go together in practice that people have muddled the two things up. But from the point of view of the selfish genes there is, as we have seen, no distinction in principle between caring for a baby brother and caring for a baby son. Both infants are equally closely related to you. If you have to choose between feeding one or the other, there is no genetic reason why you should choose your own son. But on the other hand you cannot, by definition, bear a baby brother. You can only care for him once somebody else has brought him into the world. In the last chapter we looked at how individual survival machines ideally should decide whether to behave altruistically towards other individuals who already exist. In this chapter we look at how they should decide whether to bring new individuals into the world.
It is over this matter that the controversy about 'group selection', which I mentioned in Chapter 1, has chiefly raged. This is because Wynne-Edwards, who has been mainly responsible for promulgating the idea of group selection, did so in the context of a theory of 'population regulation'. He suggested that individual animals deliberately and altruistically reduce their birth rates for the good of the group as a whole.
This is a very attractive hypothesis, because it fits so well with what individual humans ought to do. Mankind is having too many children. Population size depends upon four things: births, deaths, immigrations and emigrations. Taking the world population as a whole, immigrations and emigrations do not occur, and we are left with births and deaths. So long as the average number of children per couple is larger than two surviving to reproduce, the numbers of babies born will tend to increase over the years at an ever-accelerating rate. In each generation the population, instead of going up by a fixed amount, increases by something more like a fixed proportion of the size that it has already reached. Since this size is itself getting bigger, the size of the increment gets bigger. If this kind of growth was allowed to go on unchecked, a population would reach astronomical proportions surprisingly quickly.
Incidentally, a thing that is sometimes not realized even by people who worry about population problems is that population growth depends on when people have children, as well as on how many they have. Since populations tend to increase by a certain proportion per generation, it follows that if you space the generations out more, the population will grow at a slower rate per year. Banners that read 'Stop at Two' could equally well be changed to 'Start at Thirty'! But in any case, accelerating population growth spells serious trouble.
We have probably all seen examples of the startling calculations that can be used to bring this home. For instance, the present population of Latin Ameri
ca is around 300 million, and already many of them are under-nourished. But if the population continued to increase at the present rate, it would take less than 500 years to reach the point where the people, packed in a standing position, formed a solid human carpet over the whole area of the continent. This is so, even if we assume them to be very skinny-a not unrealistic assumption. In 1,000 years from now they would be standing on each other's shoulders more than a million deep. By 2,000 years, the mountain of people, travelling outwards at the speed of light, would have reached the edge of the known universe.
It will not have escaped you that this is a hypothetical calculation! It will not really happen like that for some very good practical reasons. The names of some of these reasons are famine, plague, and war; or, if we are lucky, birth control. It is no use appealing to advances in agricultural science-'green revolutions' and the like. Increases in food production may temporarily alleviate the problem, but it is mathematically certain that they cannot be a long-term solution; indeed, like the medical advances that have precipitated the crisis, they may well make the problem worse, by speeding up the rate of the population expansion. It is a simple logical truth that, short of mass emigration into space, with rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second, uncontrolled birth-rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death-rates. It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for 'natural' methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.
But of course the unease that such long-term calculations arouse is based on concern for the future welfare of our species as a whole. Humans (some of them) have the conscious foresight to see ahead to the disastrous consequences of over-population. It is the basic assumption of this book that survival machines in general are guided by selfish genes, who most certainly cannot be expected to see into the future, nor to have the welfare of the whole species at heart. This is where Wynne-Edwards parts company with orthodox evolutionary theorists. He thinks there is a way in which genuine altruistic birth-control can evolve.
The Selfish Gene Page 15
