Читать книгу Mutual Aid - Pablo Servigne - Страница 29

In the mid-1970s, Edward O. Wilson, a brilliant professor at Harvard University specializing in social insects, in particular ants, created a new scientific discipline: sociobiology.⁷¹ He proposed to synthesize everything that is known about animal societies using methods derived from ethology, genetics and the science of evolution. In his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, published in 1975, he created an impressive compilation of the latest experimental knowledge on the subject,⁷² but also cemented his point with a simple mathematical equation borrowed from a young British student, William Hamilton, that supposedly explained the evolution of all social behaviour. A bold move!

Hamilton’s equation refers to genetics and describes a very simple idea: an individual has genes in common with its fellows (especially its family); so, by helping one of its relatives (i.e. to survive and reproduce), it participates indirectly in the transmission of a proportion of its own genes. In other words, I have more interest in sacrificing myself for my brother (who has many of my genes) than in sacrificing myself for a complete stranger. So, according to the theory,⁷³ ‘altruistic genes’ spread via mutual aid among relatives.

Also in 1975, a book appeared which represented a landmark in the history of biology: Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. Drawing on some very effective metaphors, it postulates that organisms are in fact only ‘robots’ manipulated by their genes, whose only goal is to perpetuate themselves. In other words, the basis of life is competition between genes and between individuals. According to this very mechanistic view, altruism and mutual aid are therefore nothing other than forms of behaviour that manipulate our genes to improve their reproductive success. Everything must be explained by our genes. This was the start of four decades of the hegemony of what one might call genetic sociobiology.⁷⁴

In the following years, generations of sociobiologists therefore endeavoured to highlight genetic correlations between organisms that cooperated. The prediction was that the closer individuals were genetically, the more they would help each other. In the initial euphoria, believing that there was a universal equation (one that was diabolically simple, and therefore beautiful), many researchers pulled the argument even further, and used it to explain altruistic human behaviour by genetic proximity. Wilson was the first, in the famous chapter 23 of his Sociobiology – the one devoted to humans – to suggest that human altruistic behaviour could be explained by the fact that apparently altruistic individuals are in reality simply helping their loved ones to reproduce more easily. This was not just a misleadingly simplistic and deterministic vision; above all, it was devoid of any experimental proof.

The argument also pulled some people in another direction: they emphasized the ‘natural’ preference for one’s family and race. Sociobiological theory gave grist to the mill of those who thought that altruism must be correlated with genetic proximity. This encouraged certain ideologues, grouped under the label of the ‘New Right’, to justify racism. On the opposite side of the political spectrum, the left, the critiques were of course vociferous, in particular on the part of the social sciences, but also in Marxist circles, which had always had a horror of biological determinism.

With regard to human beings, sociobiological hypotheses have not been supported by the facts. Hamilton’s little equation was a great machine for telling stories about genetics, a branch of biology which had the wind in its sails at the time and did not hide its desire to lord it over the other branches.⁷⁵ Finally, this theory was part of a very utilitarian worldview, based on individualism, competition and selfishness, and probably owing its birth in part to the context of the Cold War.

So the 2000s began with this paradox: sociobiology, which considered nature as fundamentally selfish, produced an increasing number of studies of altruism and cooperation – and this ultimately resulted in some extraordinary discoveries.