The Meme Machine

148 THE MEME MACHINE
(1991) calls ‘greater-goodism’ – the view that evolution proceeds for the good of
the group or the species. Greater-goodism permeated biological thinking in the
early part of the twentieth century and is still a popular way of misunderstanding
evolution. On this view selection works ‘for the survival of the species’ or ‘for
the good of humankind’. The reason this cannot work is simple. Think about
the chance of infiltrators. Let us suppose there were a species of wild dog in
which each dog gladly caught rabbits for every other dog, and the pack lived in
amiable harmony. As long as this harmony prevailed all the dogs would benefit.
But now imagine that a new dog appears that just eats all the meat he is given
and never bothers to do any catching. He will, of course, get the best food, have
more time to pursue the best bitches, and will generally live better. He will then,
no doubt, pass on his selfishness genes to his many well-fed puppies. So much
for the good of the pack – selfishness for the individual must pay.
The problems of thinking in terms of the good of the species were gradually
recognised and since the early 1960s ‘group selection’ has been almost entirely
abolished from neo-Darwinism (I shall consider some exceptions later). The
answer that has so successfully transformed the problem of altruism is selfish
gene theory. If you put the replicator at the heart of evolution and see selection
as acting to the advantage of some genes rather than others, then many forms of
altruism make perfect sense.
Take parental care, for example. Your own children inherit half of your
genes. Your children are the only direct way your genes can be carried on into
future generations and so parental care is obviously needed, but this same
principle can be applied to many other kinds of altruism. Darwin hinted that
‘selection may be applied to the family’ (1859, p. 258) but did not pursue the
idea any further. The British biologist J. B. S. Haldane first noted, in 1955, that
a gene for selflessly jumping into a dangerous river to save a drowning child
could flourish easily if that child were your own, and might still flourish, though
less easily, if you saved your cousin, your niece or another more distant relative.
In 1963 a young PhD student in London, tackling on his own the
unfashionable topic of altruism, had just had his first paper turned down. He
became so lonely struggling with the unfamiliar mathematics involved that he
sometimes used to work all evening in the main hall at Waterloo railway station
just to have people around him (Hamilton 1996). But William Hamilton’s next
paper, ‘The genetical evolution of social behaviour’ (1964), became a classic.
He put numbers to Haldane’s suggestion and developed what has come to be
known as the theory of kin selection. He imagined a gene G that tends to cause