Abstract
The puzzle of how altruism can evolve has been at the center of recent debates over Hamilton’s Rule, inclusive fitness, and kin-selection. In this paper, I use recent debates over altruism and Hamilton’s legacy as an example to illustrate a more general problem in evolutionary theory that has philosophical significance; I attempt to explain this significance and to draw a variety of conclusions about it. The problem is that specific behaviours and general concepts of organism agency and intentionality are defined in terms of concepts of evolutionary “costs” and “benefits,” and these terms have determined the role that agency should play in evolutionary explanation. However, costs, benefits, and agency are not only or even best conceived through evolutionary effects in a biological context. The paper proceeds as follows: first, I explain how the issue of agency relates to the evolutionary puzzle of altruism. Next, I discuss how questions about agency have figured in recent debates over Hamilton’s legacy. In the final section, I argue that Denis Walsh’s “situated Darwinism,” which attempts to return the organism to central status in biological explanation, offers a more productive route for thinking about different forms of costs, benefits, and agency. Finally, I argue that the upshot of all this is that there may be many different, and equally valid, ways to express what organisms are doing and how they are behaving based on different currencies of cost and benefit—even if these may stand in some tension. I illustrate this through returning to the case of altruism and using examples to show that even in non-humans there can be many forms of altruism, even if they are not all biological altruism as defined in the conventional evolutionary terms.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
I thank one of the reviewers for bringing attention to this criticism.
I thank one of the reviewers of this paper for pointing this out.
I thank one of the reviewers for noting the relevance of this historical shift to the issues raised in this article.
References
Abbot P et al (2011) Inclusive fitness theory and eusociality. Nature 471:E1–E4. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09831 (author reply E9–10)
Akçay E, Cleve JV (2012) Behavioral responses in structured populations pave the way to group optimality. Am Nat 179:257–269. https://doi.org/10.1086/663691
Akçay E, Van Cleve J (2016) There is no fitness but fitness, and the lineage is its bearer. Philos Trans R Soc B Biol Sci 371:20150085. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0085
Akçay E, Van Cleve J, Feldman MW, Roughgarden J (2009) A theory for the evolution of other-regard integrating proximate and ultimate perspectives. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 106:19061–19066
Allen B, Nowak MA (2016) There is no inclusive fitness at the level of the individual. Behav Ecol 12:122–128. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2016.10.002
Allen B, Nowak MA, Wilson EO (2013) Limitations of inclusive fitness. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 110:20135–20139. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1317588110
Anscombe GEM (2000) Intention. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Birch J (2017) The inclusive fitness controversy: finding a way forward. R Soc Open Sc 4:170335. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.170335
Birch J, Okasha S (2015) Kin selection and its critics. BioScience 65:22–32. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biu196
Clavien C, Chapuisat M (2013) Altruism across disciplines: one word, multiple meanings. Biol Philos 28:125–140. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-012-9317-3
Clutton-Brock TH (1991) The evolution of parental care. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Clutton-Brock TH, O’Riain MJ, Brotherton PNM, Gaynor D, Kansky R, Griffin AS, Manser M (1999) Selfish sentinels in cooperative mammals. Science 284:1640–1644. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.284.5420.1640
Dawkins R (1989) The selfish gene. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Dridi S, Akcay E (2018) Learning to cooperate: the evolution of social rewards in repeated interactions. Am Nat 191:58–73. https://doi.org/10.1086/694822
Godfrey-Smith P (2009) Darwinian populations and natural selection. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Grafen A (2014) The formal darwinism project in outline. Biol Philos 29:155–174. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-013-9414-y
Hamilton WD (1964) The genetical evolution of social behaviour. I. J Theor Biol 7:1–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-5193(64)90038-4
Joyce R (2006) The evolution of morality. MIT Press, Cambridge
Kokko H, Jennions MD (2008) Parental investment, sexual selection and sex ratios. J Evol Biol 21:919–948. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1420-9101.2008.01540.x
Lehmann L, Rousset F (2010) How life history and demography promote or inhibit the evolution of helping behaviours. Philos Trans R Soc B Biol Sci 365:2599–2617. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0138
Lehmann L, Rousset F (2014) Fitness, inclusive fitness, and optimization. Biol Philos 29:181–195. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-013-9415-x
Lehmann L, Alger I, Weibull J (2015) Does evolution lead to maximizing behaviour? Evolution 69:1858–1873. https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.12701
Liao X, Rong S, Queller DC (2015) Relatedness, conflict, and the evolution of eusociality. PLoS Biol 13:e1002098. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002098
Mayr E (1961) Cause and effect in biology. Science 134:1501. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.134.3489.1501
McNamara JM, Gasson CE, Houston AI (1999) Incorporating rules for responding into evolutionary games. Nature 401:368
Nagel T (1989) The view from nowhere. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Nowak MA (2006) Evolutionary dynamics: exploring the equations of life. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Nowak MA, Tarnita CE, Wilson EO (2010) The evolution of eusociality. Nature 466:1057–1062. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09205
Okasha S (2010) Altruism researchers must cooperate. Nature 467:653–655
Okasha S (2013) Biological altruism. In: Zalta EN (ed) The Stanford encylopedia of philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/altruism-biological/
Queller DC (1997) Why do females care more than males? Proc R Soc Lond B 264:1555–1557. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1997.0216
Rodrigues AMM, Kokko H (2016) Models of social evolution: can we do better to predict ‘who helps whom to achieve what’? Philos Trans R Soc B Biol Sci 371:20150088. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0088
Roughgarden J, Oishi M, Akçay E (2006) Reproductive social behaviour: cooperative games to replace sexual selection. Science 311:965–969
Sober E, Wilson DS (1998) Unto others: the evolution and psychology of unselfish behaviour. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Tomasello M (2016) A natural history of human morality. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Trivers R (1971) The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Q Rev Biol 46:35–57. https://doi.org/10.1086/406755
Trivers R (1972) Parental investment and sexual selection. In: Campbell B (ed) Sexual selection and the descent of man, 1871–1971. Aldine, Chicago, pp 136–179
Walsh DM (2016) Organisms, agency, and evolution. Cambridge University Press, New York
Walsh D, Lewins T, Ariew A (2002) The trials of life: natural selection and random drift. Philos Sci 69:429–446. https://doi.org/10.1086/342454
West SA, Gardner A (2013) Adaptation and inclusive fitness. Curr Biol 23:R577–R584. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.05.031
West SA, Griffin AS, Gardner A (2007) Social semantics: altruism, cooperation, mutualism, strong reciprocity and group selection. J Evol Biol 20:415–432. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1420-9101.2006.01258.x
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank two reviewers for very insightful comments and suggestions on this article and for pointing me to helpful additional literature. I would also like to thank Tim Clutton-Brock and everyone in the Large Animal Research Group at Cambridge for discussing these issues with me.
Funding
The author was funded by a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
All contributions to this article have been made by the author.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The author declares that he has no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Woodford, P.J. The many meanings of “cost” and “benefit:” biological altruism, biological agency, and the identification of social behaviours. Biol Philos 34, 4 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-018-9667-6
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-018-9667-6