Part 4:12D Sociobiology

While the ‘selfishness-is-natural’ excuse put forward by Social Darwinists greatly relieved upset humans of the insecurity of their condition, there was always in the background an unsettling awareness that there were, in fact, situations in nature that challenged the idea that selfishness is universal. So while it is undisputable that most of nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’—that members of most species do selfishly compete and fight with each other for food, shelter, territory and a mate—it is also true that not all of nature is characterised by such selfishness, as evidenced by the three particular situations listed below.

FIRSTLY, selfless behaviour is not uncommon amongst animals, particularly in highly social species. For example, wolves and African wild dogs bring meat back to members of the pack not present at the kill. In numerous bird species, such as the Australian kookaburra, a breeding pair receives support in raising its young from other ‘helper’ birds who protect the nest from predators and help to feed the fledglings. Vampire bats regularly donate regurgitated blood to other members of their group who have failed to feed that night, ensuring they do not starve. Many animals also give alarm calls to alert others in their group to the presence of a predator, even though in doing so they seemingly attract attention to themselves and increase their personal risk of attack.

But while such occasional selfless behaviour certainly challenges the argument that selfishness is a natural, universal characteristic of nature, the continually selfless behaviour of ants and bees and the few other completely social colonial species, such as termites, leaves the argument in tatters. Indeed, in The Origin of Species Darwin considered the question of how the natural selection process, in which only traits that selfishly reproduce carry on, can possibly develop selfless traits, such as those exhibited by social ants and bees, to be the most serious challenge to his theory of evolution by natural selection.

When, in religious scripture, King Solomon said, ‘Go to the ant…consider its ways and be wise’ (Proverbs 6:6), he has most often been interpreted as meaning, ‘Look at the ants and acknowledge their industry.’ However, the real meaning of that proverb is to look at the ants and acknowledge how selflessly and cooperatively they are behaving and, as a result of that behaviour, how functional, effective and harmoniously integrated their societies are, and ask ourselves why don’t we humans behave like that? But whenever faced with human-condition-confronting truths such as this, we upset, competitive, aggressive and selfish, human-condition-afflicted humans invariably found a way of denying them. In this case, instead of advocating an examination of why ant societies function so well, which would quickly reveal that ants are extremely selfless, and becoming ‘wise’ from making that observation, the proverb was evasively misinterpreted as referring to the industry of ants. Due to their extremely selfless, consider-the-larger-whole-above-self behaviour, ant and bee colonies are extraordinarily functional and harmoniously integrated—so much so, in fact, that the colony can be considered a single organism, a superorganism comprised of the queen and her many workers of different castes (such as food gatherers, soldiers, nest cleaners, nursery attendants, etc) selflessly working together for the greater good of the colony. The workers behave much like the parts of our body work together for its greater good; indeed, we can compare the food gathering worker ants to the red blood cells that scurry throughout our body selflessly delivering ‘food’ (oxygen) to all its parts. The 2004 award-winning documentary Ants—Nature’s Secret Power admitted the power of selfless cooperation and its ‘superorganism’-creating effect in ants when it concluded that ‘The secret of ant societies is their cooperation…[it’s what has enabled them to] act as a superorganism…[and become] nature’s true world power’ (produced by Adi Mayer Films, ORF Austrian Broadcasting Company with Docstar and WDR). The extreme selflessness of bees was also made clear in a documentary on bee colonies, which reported that ‘when bees become sick they sacrifice themselves and leave the hive to die to prevent infecting the rest of the colony’, and ‘in the summer, the workers only live around 30 days because they literally work themselves to death’ (Silence of the Bees, produced by Partisan Pictures, Inc. and Thirteen/​WNET for National Geographic Channel, 2007). In his book The Soul of the White Ant, Eugène Marais also made the same point when he observed that ‘the termite…never rests or sleeps’ (1937, p.61 of 154).

Significantly, however, not only has the extremely selfless behaviour of ants, bees, termites—and the two dozen or so other completely social, fully integrated colonial varieties of multicellular animals, which includes some wasps, a species of beetle, several variety of shrimp, some gall-making aphids and two independently evolved mole rat species—been very exposing, confronting and condemning of us upset, divisive, selfish, competitive and aggressive, dysfunctionally behaved, human-condition-suffering humans, it was also very exposing, confronting and condemning because it presented stark evidence of the development of order of matter on Earth. As explained in Part 4:4B, atoms have come together or integrated to form molecules, which in turn have integrated to form compounds, which have integrated to form virus-like organisms, then single-celled organisms, which have then integrated to form multicellular organisms, and now we have the example of how multicellular animals have come together to form the next level of order and larger whole of a fully integrated association of multicellular animals, the ‘superorganism’. Ants and bees and the few other completely social colonial animals just mentioned bear stark witness to the theme of existence, which is the development of order or integration of matter, a theme that, as emphasised in Part 4:4B, has been unbearably condemning of our apparent divisive, non-integrative human-condition-afflicted lives. In short, ants and bees and their like challenged the defence we were using against Integrative Meaning that change was directionless and random.

Yes, ants and bees and the few other completely social colonial species confronted us on all levels with the Godly, integrative meaning of existence—they confronted us with the elementary truth about existence, which is that selflessness is an ideal way to behave; and they confronted us with the overall truth about existence of Integrative Meaning. Having become a selflessly behaved, consider-the-larger-whole-above-self, fully integrated group of multicellular animals, within their colonies they were behaving in a way consistent with the next level of the integrative process, which is the way we knew we should be behaving!

The SECOND situation in nature that contradicts the idea that selfishness is universal is the existence of our own instinctive moral conscience that informs us that it isn’t right to be selfishly inconsiderate of others and not live in accordance with Integrative Meaning. Our own charitable, consider-the-larger-whole-above-self, integration-orientated moral instincts also strongly contradicted the excuses we were using that ‘selfishness is all that is occurring in nature, there’s no such thing as an integrative process because change is directionless and random’.

Both situations listed thus far contribute to the THIRD situation in nature that contradicts the selfishness-is-universal interpretation, which is the obvious overall theme in nature of the integration of matter. As described in Part 4:4B, not only do we have moral instincts that inform us that selfless, cooperative, integrative behaviour is meaningful, our everyday observation of nature—be it animal, mineral or vegetable—reveals that truth. We are surrounded by examples of ordered matter, by arrangements of matter where the parts of the arrangement are behaving cooperatively. A tree’s leaves, branches, trunk, roots and bark, and indeed all the cells of all those parts of the tree, live in a state of harmonious cooperation—even behaving selflessly, such as when leaves fall (in effect, give their life) in autumn so that the tree as a whole can better survive through winter. Again, our body is a similar collection of cooperating parts. Almost everywhere we look we see arrangements of ordered matter and we see how well those arrangements benefit from all the parts working together in a selfless fashion. In fact, in the instances where there isn’t such cooperation, such as where we see competition and fighting between organisms, we realise how destabilising, disintegrative and divisive such behaviour is. Moreover, we are able to realise from observing our surroundings that there is a hierarchy of ordered matter—animals are a collection of parts, and, in the many societies of animals, each animal is a part of the larger whole of its society, and, in turn, societies of animals are all part of the larger whole of a developing ‘ecosystem’. Indeed, all of nature appears to be one vast system trying to create order out of an initial chaos of individual elements and parts. We even have a word, ‘holism’, which recognises ‘the tendency in nature to form wholes’ (Concise Oxford Dict. 5th edn, 1964).

So, in summary, far from selfishness appearing to be the universal characteristic of life on Earth, some animals were behaving selflessly—considering others, the larger integrated whole, above their own interests. Such behaviour was particularly apparent in the communalism of ant and bee colonies. Also contradicting the ‘selfishness-is-universal-in-nature-so-that’s-why-we-are-selfish, there’s-no-such-thing-as-an-integrative-process-because-change-is-directionless-and-random’ excuse for our divisive, selfish, competitive and aggressive human condition was the existence of our moral conscience, as well as our everyday observations of the overall integrative theme in nature. These situations certainly placed humanity in a pickle, in deep trouble: how were we to get out of this highly exposing, confronting and condemning corner? Clearly what was desperately needed was the true dignifying and redeeming biological explanation of our less-than-ideally-behaved, competitive and aggressive human condition, but while that liberating insight remained unknown all that was possible was to somehow contrive an even trickier excuse than Social Darwinism for our divisive condition—one that could be used to counter the criticism emanating from these three situations.

Not only did a counter have to be found to these apparent contradictions to the notion that nature is entirely competitive and selfish, a growing view that nature is characterised by selflessness not selfishness had also to be countered. As was explained in some detail in Parts 3:11G and 3:11H, without the reconciling understanding of why humans became competitive, aggressive and selfish when the ideals—which our moral conscience expected us to behave in accordance with—are to be cooperative, loving and selfless, two opposing philosophical positions emerged. When the upset that unavoidably developed from the human race’s search for knowledge became extreme some people, the right-wing, wanted to continue the upsetting, corrupting search for knowledge, while others, the left-wing, wanted to abandon that corrupting search and return to supporting more idealistic values. The result in biology was that, while not wanting to admit to Integrative Meaning too directly and by so doing have to confront the unbearable issue of the human condition, left-wing-supporting biologists did want to admit to a more integrative, ideal existence. So what happened is that right up until the 1960s these biologists resisted the right-wing, selfishness-and-competition-justifying Social Darwinist view and interpreted what was happening in the natural world as one immense order-developing, cooperative, selfless, loving process, however this meant overlooking the fact that the natural selection process involved in this development of order of matter is highly competitive and selfish.

There is a Negative-Entropy-driven, teleological, holistic, integrative, order-of-matter-developing direction to change, and natural selection has developed a great deal of integrated, ordered matter, namely the great variety of life we see on Earth, BUT, because of the limitation of the gene-based mechanism for developing that order of matter, which is that genetic traits have to reproduce if they are to carry on, natural selection does operate from an individualistic, selfish and competitive basis. Even though, overall, natural selection does develop order, it is in practice a highly competitive and selfish process. This is the great paradox of the natural selection process: overall natural selection is dedicated to developing integrative order but it has to do it through extremely divisive competition! What this means is that those who opposed the Social Darwinist’s emphasis on selfishness and stressed the development of order in nature were correct in recognising that life and nature are concerned with developing cooperative order, they were incorrect in overlooking the fact that at the operational level natural selection is a highly selfish and competitive process. What was basically occurring is that selfishness-emphasising right-wing biologists were rightly stressing the fact that the natural selection process is extremely selfish and competitive, while socialistic left-wing biologists were naively overlooking that reality and trying to emphasise the greater truth of the integration of matter. What was missing was the reconciling understanding that, as emphasised in the previous Part 4:12B, natural selection is a limited tool for achieving the integration of matter—that limitation being that only traits that are selfish can reproduce and thus carry on in the species.

Despite it being an extremely naive position to take to not recognise that natural selection is an extremely selfish and competitive process, many left-leaning biologists took that position anyway in an effort to counter the right-wing, selfishness-and-competition-justifying Social Darwinist view. For instance, in 1880 the Russian zoologist Karl Kessler maintained that (the underlinings are my emphasis) ‘the progressive development of the animal kingdom, and especially of mankind, is favoured much more by [selfless] mutual support than by mutual struggle’ (Address titled On the law of mutual aid to the St Petersburg Society of Naturalists, Jan. 1880). The truth is, while there is an integrative, ‘progressive development of the animal kingdom’, the integrative limitation of the natural selection process is that, apart from in the case of ‘mankind’, it only ‘favoured’ selfish ‘struggle’, not selfless ‘mutual support’. At the beginning of the twentieth century, another Russian zoologist, Peter Kropotkin, who as an avowed communist, was being extremely naive when he wrote about natural selection as being concerned with ‘the progressive evolution of the species’ (Intro.), writing in his 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, for example, that ‘in all these scenes of animal life which passed before my eyes, I saw Mutual Aid and Mutual Support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species, and its further evolution’ (Intro.). Natural selection is part of a greater integrative, order-of-matter-developing, ‘progressive’ process, but natural selection itself is limited to being only concerned with competition between sexually reproducing individuals, which means virtually ‘all these scenes of animal life’ that we see ‘before’ our ‘eyes’ are not concerned with ‘Mutual Aid and Mutual Support’ but with extreme competition between sexually reproducing individuals. This misrepresentation of natural selection as being socialistic rather than individualistic was still occurring into the 1960s—for instance, in his 1963 book On Aggression, the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian behaviourist Konrad Lorenz wrote frequently of behaviour having ‘a species-preserving function’ (pp.23, 29, 30, 46, 50, 72, 85, 86, 87, 92, 104, 113, 119, 140, 141 of 324). The development of species is part of the integrative process, but the behaviour of a species is all about extreme competition between its sexually reproducing members. Each sexually reproducing individual is interested in its own ‘preserv[ation]’, not that of the ‘species’. In a similar misrepresentation of natural selection being interested in more than what assists the sexually reproducing individual to reproduce, in 1962 the English zoologist V.C. Wynne-Edwards argued that individual organisms restrain themselves from consuming food and from reproducing so that the population can avoid crashing to extinction (Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour). Also, when in 1960 the eminent American termite biologist Alfred E. Emerson put forward the view that all of nature was as functionally integrated as a termite colony (‘The evolution of adaptation in population systems’; Evolution after Darwin, vol.1, ed. S. Tax, pp.301-348) he was naively overlooking the central principle of Darwin’s idea of natural selection, which is that it is an extremely competitive and divisive process.

Yes, those who thought of the natural selection process in terms of sexually reproducing individuals being concerned with preserving the species were rightly described in the scientific literature as ‘naive’. The principle of natural selection asserts that only those individuals that successfully compete will manage to reproduce their characteristics, and that it is through this competitive process that the great variety of species, the integration of matter, on Earth developed.

So right-wing biologists, who were defending humanity’s corrupting journey to find knowledge, were left with the task of countering the socialistic left-wing biologists’ naive, pseudo idealistic, ‘for the good of the group/​species/​larger whole’ biological thinking that came dangerously close to acknowledging the unconfrontable truth of Integrative Meaning. They needed to remind everyone that natural selection is actually an extremely individualistic, competitive and selfish process, and they needed to maintain denial of the integrative theme of existence. Further, they needed to find a way to deal with the problem that the selfless behaviour being practiced by some social animals, especially ants and bees, and our own selfless, consider-the-welfare-of-others, moral conscience contradicts the selfishness-justifying argument that selfishness is universal in nature and that’s why we are selfish. This was a tall order indeed, but during the 1960s and early 1970s right-wing biologists did manage to achieve this. The solution was a theory called Sociobiology, which eventually developed into the theory of Evolutionary Psychology, and its main architects were the British biologists William Hamilton and John Maynard Smith, and the American biologists George Williams and Edward (E.) O. Wilson.

This fight-back against the naive, pseudo idealism of left-wing biologists who were verging on letting the condemning truth of Integrative Meaning out, began in earnest when, after attending a lecture in 1965 on why people age and die by the aforementioned left-wing biologist Alfred E. Emerson, in which Emerson naively claimed that ‘We’ve evolved to do it [die] so we get out of the way, so the young people can go on maintaining the species’, George Williams stated that he ‘thought it was absolute nonsense’ (‘Stretching the Limits of Evolutionary Biology: A Profile of George Williams’, Carl Zimmer, Science, 28 May 2004). His disgust prompted him to write his now famous 1966 book Adaptation and Natural Selection that basically reminded everyone that natural selection is an extremely individualistic, competitive and selfish process, so much so that it would overcome any inclination by organisms to selflessly consider the welfare of the group/​species above their own welfare. It was this publication that in particular led to the kin-selection based theory of Sociobiology/​Evolutionary Psychology that managed to re-assert the selfishness-is-all-that-is-occurring-in-nature view and provide the means to counter any recognition of Integrative Meaning. Hamilton, Maynard Smith, Williams and Wilson’s contribution to the development of the ‘get out of jail’ (escape having to confront the human condition) theory of Sociobiology/​Evolutionary Psychology will now be described in the process of explaining the theory.

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We need to begin the description of how these men managed to get the human race ‘out of jail’ by explaining that incidences of apparent selfless behaviour practiced by some non-human animals, including the apparent selfless behaviour practiced by colonial living worker ants and bees and their kind, can be accounted for by the concept of reciprocal selflessness, which, as was described in the previous Part 4:12B, is not actually selfless behaviour but selfish behaviour—which means that at least for these situations where there is apparent selfless behaviour, the ‘selfishness-is-all-that-is-occurring-in-nature’, ‘selfishness-is-just-the-way-life-works-and-that’s-why-we-are-selfish’, ‘survival of the fittest’, Social Darwinist account still stands. What will now also be described is that this reciprocal selflessness argument could supposedly also be used to assert that our selfless moral instincts were a manifestation of this ‘reciprocal-selflessness-that-is-actually-selfishness’, in which case, the ‘selfishness-is-the-natural-way-to-behave’, ‘we-can’t-help-it-if-we-are-selfish’, ‘survival of the fittest’, Social Darwinist account would then be fully confirmed. HOWEVER, as will be explained, the ‘reciprocal-selflessness-that-is-actually-selfishness’ argument wasn’t in itself sufficient to relieve humans of the agony of the human condition—something even more was needed; as we will see, a way had also to be found to avoid having to confront the truth of Integrative Meaning.

Firstly, to further explain how the concept of reciprocal selflessness reveals that the apparent selfless behaviour practiced by some non-human animals, including that of the colonial living worker ants and bees and their kind, is actually a form of selfishness.

While only developed as a theory in the early 1970s by biologists such as Robert Trivers, the reciprocal selflessness explanation for all apparent altruistic behaviour amongst non-human animals is, nevertheless, reasonably obvious for anyone thinking about natural selection. Clearly, unconditionally selfless traits tend to self-eliminate—that being the very definition of unconditional selflessness: doing something for others without incurring any personal benefit. As such, a self-eliminating trait can’t become established through natural selection. But, a selfless act towards another that resulted in the recipient returning the favour—a selfless act that was reciprocated—clearly could be developed by natural selection, because the outcome was ultimately and mutually beneficial, not detrimental. Reciprocated acts of selflessness benefit both parties, which, in the final analysis, means the selflessness is actually selfishness.

To reiterate, Darwin’s idea of natural selection revealed that organisms compete with other organisms to reproduce their characteristics, which, when the molecular biologists James Watson and Francis Crick identified the actual mechanism behind natural selection of the DNA molecule in 1953, we learnt meant reproducing their genes. If the gene for a trait doesn’t manage to reproduce—if it doesn’t successfully compete—then it can’t become established in the species. Genes are intrinsically selfish. An unconditionally selfless trait—a trait that doesn’t tend to reproduce and carry on—cannot normally become established in a species (that is, outside the love-indoctrination situation that, as was briefly explained in Part 4:4D and will be fully explained in Part 8:4B, allowed humans’ unconditionally selfless moral instincts to develop). What this means—and this has already been explained and emphasised, such as in the previous Part 4:12B—is that the most amount of selflessness that can normally be developed genetically is reciprocal selflessness, where a favour is given in return for a favour, because the trait is still intrinsically selfish since both parties benefit. The trait is not unconditionally selfless—it is still meeting the requirements of natural selection, which is that for a trait to become established it has to selfishly carry on from generation to generation.

Reciprocal-selflessness-that-is-actually-selfishness does actually explain all apparent selflessness in nature—the only exception being the unconditionally selfless behaviour that is characteristic of our moral instincts, which again was a result of the love-indoctrination process. For example, a reciprocal-selflessness explanation for the seemingly altruistic alarm calls given by vervet monkeys (which alert other monkeys to danger but seemingly expose the caller to an increased risk of predation) is that while giving an alarm call does expose the caller to increased risk, the caller also benefits from others giving the alarm call, so that overall there is a net benefit to each member in giving alarm calls. While the alarm-calling trait appears to be a selfless one, it actually leads to the reproduction of that trait, which, in the final analysis, means it is intrinsically selfish. It might be mentioned that the precondition for the development of this particular form of reciprocal selflessness, which is frequently called ‘reciprocal altruism’, is that those benefiting from the ‘selflessness’ remain present to return the favour. If a favour is given and the recipient is never seen again then the favour can’t be reciprocated. So what is required for ‘reciprocal altruism’ to develop is for groups not to be too large and for the association with the others in the group to occur over a long period.

(Note that ‘reciprocal altruism’ should more properly be termed ‘reciprocal apparent altruism’, or ‘reciprocal selflessness’ as I have been calling it, because, as explained, being reciprocal the selflessness is actually a subtle form of selfishness—it is not real or true selflessness. Altruism means unconditionally selfless behaviour and this ‘selfless’ behaviour is not unconditionally selfless. Biologists have been using the term ‘altruism’ to describe apparent selfless behaviour amongst non-human animals when they should not. Only humans have been able to develop unconditionally selfless, truly altruistic behaviour, and we achieved that through love indoctrination, a process that is fully explained in Part 8:4B.)

If we think about it, the reciprocal-selflessness-that-is-actually-selfishness situation can even explain the apparent unconditionally selfless behaviour of the colonial-living worker ants and bees. While the sterile individual workers in the colonies of ants and bees (and this also applies to the other two dozen or so completely social colonial varieties of termite, wasp, beetle, shrimp, aphid, mole rat, and others) appear to be behaving unconditionally selflessly, they are actually each behaving selfishly, because by selflessly looking after their colony and queen, who carries the genes for their existence, they are indirectly selfishly ensuring the reproduction of their own genes. The sterile workers support the queen and she in turn reproduces their genes, which means that, despite appearances, the workers aren’t behaving in an unconditionally selfless, truly altruistic way, but in a conditionally selfless way. The sterile workers’ selfless support of the queen is conditional on the queen selflessly reproducing their genes. It is a situation of reciprocity where both parties benefit, which means that what is occurring is still, in essence, selfish behaviour. The seeming unconditionally selfless behaviour of the workers is actually a subtle or indirect form of selfishness. As such, the completely social ants, bees, termites, wasps, beetles, shrimps, aphids and mole rats (and others) aren’t behaving unconditionally selflessly after all; they are behaving selfishly—a situation that, as mentioned, could supposedly also be used to argue that our own selfless moral instincts are a form of reciprocal-selflessness-that-is-actually-genetic-selfishness, thus supposedly confirming ‘the selfishness-is-all-that-is-occurring-in-nature, selfishness-is-the-natural-way-to-behave, we-can’t-help-it-if-we-are-selfish, selfishness-is-just-the-way-life-works, ‘survival of the fittest’, Social Darwinist account.

However, in terms of avoiding the unbearable issue of the human condition, a very significant problem remained, which was that the reciprocal-selflessness-that-is-actually-selfishness account could still leave humans having to confront the truth of the integrative, development-of-order-of-matter theme of existence, which was unbearably condemning because, if accepted, it implied that we humans should be cooperative and selfless. The problem was that any recognition of the importance of the group, such as that worker ants and bees toil to preserve the group or society or larger whole of the colony, is a recognition of the integrative, hierarchical process, which, as has been mentioned, involves atoms coming together or integrating to form molecules, which in turn integrate to form compounds, which integrate to form single-celled organisms, which integrate to form multicellular organisms, which integrate to form groups or societies or unified associations of multicellular organisms. Even the word ‘selflessness’ involved in the concept of ‘reciprocal selflessness’ is condemning of upset, competitive and aggressive, human-condition-afflicted humans, because being selfless means showing consideration for the maintenance of a larger whole. It is a recognition of Integrative Meaning. The word ‘sociality’ was similarly dangerous because it too raised the idea of the development and maintenance of a larger whole. In the case of ‘reciprocal altruism’, such as exhibited by the alarm calls of vervet monkeys, while it is in the end selfish behaviour, it has occurred as a result of the whole integration-of-matter, development-of-order, socialisation process. Clearly what was needed to save humans from unbearable condemnation was a way of interpreting these situations in a way that didn’t involve any group/​larger whole/​socialisation/​integration emphasis or recognition—a way to describe what is happening in nature that avoided even the possibility of there being an integrative process, for example, a way that eliminated the possibility that the behaviour of vervet monkeys could be interpreted as being part of some integrative, order-developing, socialisation process. And it was precisely this no-larger-whole-emphasising, no-recognition-of-socialisation, no-integration-involved interpretation that Hamilton, Maynard Smith, Williams and Wilson ingeniously came up with. The concept was called ‘kin selection’ and it was the foundation idea behind Sociobiology.

Kin selection is actually a particular variety of reciprocal selflessness that is based on relatedness. It proposes that animals are more likely to behave selflessly towards relatives/​kin who share at least some of their genes than towards those who are unrelated because by fostering their kin they are fostering the reproduction of their own genes that their kin share. Further, kin selection maintains that the closer the relationship and thus the more genes they share, the more selfless they are likely to be. In terms of relieving humans of the agony of the human condition, the great benefit of kin selection is that it is entirely focused on the individual, not on the group/​colony/​society/​larger whole/​integration of matter. As an encyclopaedic entry on kin selection notes (the italics are as they appear in the text): ‘kin selection…theory…apparently showed how altruistic behaviour could evolve without the need for group-level selection’ (Biological Altruism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2008 revision). It was this ‘not-the-group-but-the-individual’ focus of kin selection that was so precious in helping humans avoid the unbearable issue of the human condition.

To take up the description again of George Williams’ famous 1966 book Adaptation and Natural Selection in which he presented by far the most influential of the attacks that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s on the ‘good of the species’ type arguments—on those who maintained that selection could occur between sexually reproducing individuals for the benefit of the group or larger whole. In Adaptation and Natural Selection Williams said that traits that are ‘for the good of the group’ might theoretically develop through a process of group selection or, more accurately, ‘between-group selection’, but that was so unlikely it would not, in fact, occur. He argued that group selection is such a weak evolutionary force that it could never overcome the power of individual selection, concluding that ‘group-related adaptations do not, in fact, exist’ (p.93 of 307). Williams wrote: ‘Only by a theory of between-group selection could we achieve a scientific explanation of group-related adaptations. However, I would question one of the premises on which the reasoning is based. Chapters 5 to 8 [of Adaptation and Natural Selection] will be primarily a defence of the thesis that group-related adaptations do not, in fact, exist’ (pp.92-93). Later, in Part 4:12H-i, group selection will be explained more fully, but the following is a brief explanation of the ‘theory of between-group selection’ and Williams’ criticism of it. As has been emphasised, the biological reality is that genes are necessarily selfish; genetic traits have to reproduce if they are to become established in a species, and an unconditionally selfless, cooperative trait doesn’t tend to reproduce. The result is that extreme competition exists amongst sexually reproducing individuals to ensure their genes reproduce; so much so that if an unconditionally selfless trait were to emerge amongst a group of sexually reproducing individuals it would be exploited by all those who were being selfish. There will always be individuals who in effect say, ‘If you want to behave selflessly towards me, that’s absolutely fine because it will benefit me, but don’t expect me to return the favour’. Selflessness is going to be subverted, undermined by opportunist cheaters or free riders. While that is the basic reality of the natural selection process, the between-group selection theory argues that while within a group of sexually reproducing individuals selflessness is going to be subverted, if there are two groups in competition against each other and one has members who are more able to behave selflessly and help each other then that group will have an advantage over the other group that doesn’t have such selfless, cooperative members, which means that unconditionally selfless cooperation supposedly could be able to be selected for. The problem with this theory, which is what Williams pointed out, is that the forces of individual selection are so strong that a group of selfless, cooperative sexually reproducing individuals is realistically never going to develop even though they would have an advantage over a group of selfish, non-cooperative sexually reproducing individuals because those who are being selfless in the group will be exploited by selfish opportunists—and thus, ‘group-related adaptations do not, in fact, exist’. Williams reiterated this view in his Preface to the 1996 reprint of Adaptation and Natural Selection: ‘I concluded [in Adaptation and Natural Selection]…that group selection was not strong enough to produce…[an] adaptation…characterized by organisms’ playing roles that would subordinate their individual interests for some higher value, as in the often proposed benefit to the species’ (p.xii).

Most significantly, the above description of the improbability of between-group selection working was in relation to groups of sexually reproducing individuals. What happened was that not only did Williams dismiss group selection as being a biologically unsound explanation for social behaviour amongst sexually reproducing individuals, he maintained that all cooperative behaviour, including that of social ants and bees and their kind (and, as we will see later, kin selection theory was even used to supposedly explain our moral instincts), was not due to larger-whole-focused group selection but only to individual-focused kin selection, with any anomalies being either a product of ‘misplaced parental behavior’ or ‘incidental’ ‘consequences of individual activities’. He wrote in Adaptation and Natural Selection that ‘Selection within a population can lead to cooperative relations among closely related individuals, because the benefits of cooperation would go mainly to individuals with the genetic basis of cooperation, rather than to those of alternative genetic makeup. Selection at the genic level thus explains insect societies and analogous developments in other organisms. Other apparent examples of altruism are explained as misplaced parental behavior. They represent imperfections in the mechanisms that normally regulate the timing and execution of parental behavior. Benefits to the group often arise as incidental statistical consequences of individual activities, just as harmful effects may accumulate in the same way’ (p.vii). While using kin selection to supposedly explain all social behaviour, including the social behaviour of ants and bees and their kind, and even our social/​moral instincts, achieved the key objective of eliminating any recognition of Integrative Meaning, it was an outrageous lie to do so. While it is true that between-group selection doesn’t seem at all possible between groups of sexually reproducing individuals, where the individuals are part of an elaborated sexually reproducing individual, such as occurs in social ants and their kind, then of course the colonies/​groups of these individuals do undergo between-group selection—colonies that are more cooperative will out-compete colonies that are not as cooperative. The issue is what constitutes the individual, but Williams/​kin selection theorists didn’t make this critical distinction, which, while it conveniently eliminates recognition of Integrative Meaning, is an outrageous lie. Between-group selection can take place when the groups involved are each composed of members of one sexually reproducing individual.

What Williams did to try to ignore the truth that social ants and their kind are part of an integrated, larger whole, an elaborated sexually reproducing individual, a ‘superorganism’ as some have called it, was to argue that the focus of the workers in the colonies was not on the queen and the maintenance of the colony, but on the reproduction of their own genes. According to Williams, the individual, not the group, was the target of the natural selection that was occurring, basically that the group had no significance beyond providing an environment for the genes to operate in. By way of providing further explanation of insect societies Williams ‘directed [the reader] to Hamilton’s papers’, which he said dealt ‘admirably’ with the subject (ibid. p.197).

Williams’ citation of ‘Hamilton’s papers’ is a reference to two papers that had been published by William Hamilton two years earlier in 1964 and which featured the first formal mathematical treatment of kin selection theory for explaining the development of apparent altruistic behaviour (‘The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour I and II’, Journal of Theoretical Biology 7: 1-16, 17-32). Although the basic concept of kin selection was alluded to in the 1930s by biologists R.A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane (Haldane famously said that ‘I would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins), it was Hamilton who first developed it into a theory in these papers. In the particularly Integrative-Meaning-revealing, human-condition-confronting case of ‘insect societies’, the big contribution to the ‘it’s-the-individual-not-the-group’ kin selection argument that Hamilton ‘admirably’ made in the papers was the haplodiploid hypothesis. This hypothesis refers to a peculiarity of the genetic system known as ‘haplodiploidy’, which exists in ants and bees, where females (all worker ants and bees are females) share, on average, more genes with their sisters than they do with their own offspring. In which case, a female worker is able to have more of her own genes survive into the next generation by helping the queen reproduce (thus increasing the number of sisters she will have) than by having offspring of her own. So that is why, according to Hamilton, sterile workers evolved—not to help the queen develop and maintain the colony, but to propagate their own genes. The point is that the haplodiploid hypothesis seemed to lend powerful credence to the theory of kin selection—in fact, it was what E.O. Wilson (whose work will be examined shortly) said for him ‘initially gave the [kin selection] formula its magnetic power’ (The Social Conquest of Earth, 2012, p.169 of 330)). Again, in terms of the problem of colonial ants and bees being extremely revealing of the integrative theme of existence, the significance of kin selection theory is that it made the colony irrelevant, for according to kin selection theory, the colony and the sterile workers only evolved because it was the best way for the workers to reproduce their genes.

As was mentioned, and as we are going to see, while kin selection supposedly provided a way of eliminating the extremely exposing and condemning problem posed by ant and bee societies, it was also used to eliminate the exposing and condemning problem posed by our own take-care-of-others, moral inclinations. Our moral instincts were said to not be unconditionally selfless but selfish instincts because they were derived from selfishly fostering relatives who shared our genes. Understandably, the human-condition-relieving powers of kin selection’s ‘there-is-no-group/​integration-of-matter-relevance’, ‘it’s-only-the-individual-that-matters’ interpretation is the reason why so many biologists in the last half of the twentieth century enthusiastically supported and adhered to ‘Williams’ first commandment: “Thou shall not apply the adaptationist [natural selection] program above the level of the individual”’ (David Sloan Wilson & Elliot Sober, 1994, ‘Re-Introducing Group Selection to the Human Behavioral Sciences’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (4): pp.585-654).

While it is true that the sterile workers in the fully integrated, completely social colonial species of ants and bees and their kind do foster the queen in order to reproduce their genes, the object or purpose of doing so is not to selfishly benefit the individual worker, as kin selection theory proposes, but to selflessly support the development and maintenance of the larger whole of the colony. Again, we only have to look at what is occurring in the body of a multicellular animal to see very clearly what is happening. The individual parts (eyes, legs, heart, etc) of the body (and, as mentioned, the completely social colonies of animals do represent a fully integrated cooperative whole like a body) work to support the maintenance of the entire being, they are not working for themselves; it is the body as a whole that is the concern or focus or purpose of their existence, just as it is the development and maintenance of the larger whole of a multicellular plant that is the target of the natural selection process. When a tree loses its leaves in autumn, those leaves haven’t given their life so that the genes for their existence will carry on in the tree that, as a result of their sacrifice, is better equipped to survive through winter—they have sacrificed themselves to ensure the larger whole of the tree survives. The object is the survival of the tree, not the survival of the leaves’ genes. Kin selection theorists seek to explain the behaviour of colonial ants and their kind in a way that avoids any group/​Integrative Meaning recognition, but in doing so they take the ‘no group relevance’ argument and the kin selection theory too far, in fact to the point of ridiculousness, but such was the need to avoid the human condition. Later, when I describe how group selection theory was resurrected from this attack by Williams and others, in the 1990s we will see that the American biologist David Sloan Wilson and the American science philosopher Eliot Sober make the point that I have just made, writing that denial of the ‘nested hierarchy of units’ in nature (the integration of matter) ‘was just plain wrong’. They pointed out that ‘According to [George] Williams and [Richard] Dawkins…even sexually reproducing organisms do not qualify as units of selection’, they are only what ‘Dawkins…called “vehicles of selection”’, ‘environments’ for the ‘selfish genes’ to achieve their goal of reproduction. They wondered ‘why genes are suitable candidates for units of selection whereas organisms, groups and so on are not’ and complained that ‘Gene-centered theorists frame-shift downward with enthusiasm but they are much more reluctant to frame-shift upward’ in ‘the biological hierarchy…[of] nested series of units’. They railed against ‘gene-centered theorists…who claimed to explain the social insects without invoking group selection’. This whole criticism of right-wing ‘gene-centered theorists’ was an obvious and easy criticism to make because of course ant and bee superorganisms exist, and of course there is an integrating ‘nested hierarchy’ of order of matter on Earth, but that overlooks the strategy employed when denying an unbearable truth: right-wing Evolutionary Psychologists weren’t worried about the truth, only about finding a possible way of denying Integrative Meaning, which they sought to achieve through promoting their kin selection theory.

So, the great attraction of the kin selection interpretation of the cooperative/​social behaviour of colonial ants and their kind was that it argued that ‘There is no group significance, it’s all about the individual maximising its chance to reproduce and there is nothing more to it than that.’ Yes, in terms of contriving an excuse for our upset individualistic, self-preoccupied, selfish, egocentric, competitive and aggressive, human-condition-suffering state, kin selection’s emphasis on the importance of the individual and not of the integration of the group/​colony/​larger whole was precious—especially for those who were extremely upset sufferers of the human condition.

It was at this point that Edward (E.) O. Wilson, the Harvard University-based biologist who had always been interested in ants, entered the scene. It will become quickly apparent to the reader that Wilson has an extremely astute radar for ideas in biology that have the potential to artificially relieve humans of the unbearable agony of the human condition. In the case of kin selection, it was Wilson who developed it into a fully evolved theory for excusing humans’ individualistic, self-preoccupied, selfish, competitive and aggressive, human-condition-afflicted behaviour—he even did the branding for it, naming it Sociobiology. As we will see, he used this kin-selection-based misrepresentation of social behaviour to dismiss and denigrate our wonderful unconditionally selfless, genuinely altruistic, truly loving moral instinctive self or soul as nothing more than a selfish strategy for reproducing our genes. It was Wilson who took the idea of kin selection and developed it into a super weapon to dishonestly and artificially remove those three problems that Social Darwinism encountered—namely that the apparent selfless behaviour of some animals, especially ants and bees, contradicted the argument that selfishness is a universal characteristic in nature; that we humans have unconditionally selfless moral instincts; and that there is an integrative theme in nature.

Wilson first became aware of Hamilton’s kin selection idea in 1965, a year after it was published, and while initially sceptical, he (as described in his 2012 book The Social Conquest of Earth) soon ‘became enchanted by the originality and promised explanatory power of kin selection. [And] In 1965, with Bill Hamilton at my side, I defended the idea before a mostly hostile audience at the Royal Entomological Society of London’ (p.169 of 330). All humans suffer from the human condition but it is evident that Wilson suffers from it a great deal. For example, as will be described later, he abhors religion and the concept of God almost as much as Richard Dawkins, Oxford University’s Professor of Public Understanding of Science, which is saying a lot because Dawkins absolutely loathes religion and the concept of God—to the point that the latter has said such things as ‘“faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus, but harder to eradicate. The whole subject of God is a bore”…those who teach religion to small children are guilty of “child abuse”’ (quoted by Garth Wood, The Spectator, 20 Feb. 1999). As explained in Part 3:11H, the rejection of religion and the concept of God is a position many people adopted when they became overly upset; to mention some of what was said in Part 3:11H, ‘By retaining the presence of a prophet’s soundness and truth, religions reminded humans of their own corrupted state and their alienation from truth, which in turn accentuated their sense of guilt; as the author Mary McCarthy once wrote about religion, ‘Only people who are very good can afford to become religious; with all the others it makes them worse’ (Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, 1957).’ I believe—and, as we will see, Wilson’s unsurpassed record in contriving human-condition-avoiding, supposedly-first-principle-based-biological denials (I will later call him ‘the Lord of Lying’) supports this opinion—that the reason Wilson ‘became enchanted’ with the ‘promised explanatory power of kin selection’ was its ‘promised’ ‘power’ to avoid the issue of the human condition.

In 1975 Wilson published his most well-known book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, in which he explained for the general public that the apparent unconditionally selfless behaviour of completely social ants, bees, termites, wasps, beetles, shrimps, aphids and mole rats, and the other completely social colonial species, is actually reciprocal selflessness, which, as stated, means it is actually selfish not selfless behaviour. He went further, maintaining that Hamilton’s haplodiploid hypothesis explanation for how sterile worker ants and bees evolved lent credence to kin selection’s argument that the focus of natural selection was the individual not the group or larger whole. But, most significantly, Wilson extrapolated beyond the ant and bee situation to argue that kin selection also explained how ‘altruistic behaviour could evolve without the need for group-level selection’ in all situations where selfless behaviour had been said to occur—including even our own moral instincts! He wrote (the underlining is mine): ‘Sociobiology is defined as the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior. For the present it focuses on animal societies…[However,] One of the functions of sociobiology…is to reformulate the foundations of the social sciences [the study of human societies] in a way that draws these subjects into the Modern Synthesis’ (p.4 of 997).

Yes, it was Wilson’s intention to have Sociobiology dismiss our wonderful unconditionally selfless, truly altruistic, genuinely loving, moral instinctive behaviour and nature as nothing more than kin selection’s reciprocal selflessness where individuals selflessly help relatives because in doing so they are indirectly selfishly fostering the reproduction of their own genes that their relatives share, which if true, would mean our moral nature is fundamentally selfish and not selfless. In fact, this is the obvious reason why Sociobiology: The New Synthesis became a famous text of such popular appeal. Indeed, the great attraction of the kin selection theory for social behaviour is that it maintains the selfishness-is-universal-and-natural-and-that-is-why-we-are-selfish excuse, and it is individualistic; its focus is on the individual, not on the colony/​group/​integration/​development-of-the-order-of-matter. A 2008 article in Wired Magazine perfectly summarised this appeal when it reported that ‘many prominent biologists, led by Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, said no, there was no such thing as a superorganism: Evolution worked on the genes of self-serving individuals only, not groups’ (‘E.O. Wilson Returns to the Hive With Superorganism Tome’, by Josh McHugh, 20 Oct. 2008).

Through the advancement of Sociobiology’s human-condition-side-stepping, selfishness-is-all-that-is-occurring-in-nature theory for social behaviour, dishonest biology had certainly gained a substantial head of steam!

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So, how was kin selection applied to ‘all social behavior’ so that no recognition of the integrative, development-of-order-of-matter process could occur—even the social behaviour ‘of human societies’?

We can begin by looking at some examples of how kin selection supposedly explained apparent selfless behaviour by and between multicellular non-human animal species who have remained sexual (that is, not become sterile and, as a result, effectively enslaved to their mother)—specifically those species who temporarily delay their own reproduction and during that time help the parents raise the next generation, such as wolves, African wild dogs, meerkats, and a number of bird species, including the Australian kookaburra. In such cases, kin selection argues that by successfully raising siblings these animals are indirectly fostering the reproduction of their own genes. However, a possible alternative explanation for this behaviour that doesn’t involve kin selection might be that by delaying leaving ‘home’ these animals are giving themselves a greater chance of inheriting the territory occupied by their parents and thus a greater chance of reproducing. In the particular case of African wild dogs, individuals that delay their chances of reproducing and during that time help the dominant female or queen dog raise the next generation have been described as strongly kin-selected because such helpers were assumed to be invariably closely related to that offspring. However, a study has shown that this assumption is not always valid because no less than 25 percent of the packs observed actually contained non-breeding adults that provided parental care to unrelated pups (J. Weldon McNutt, 1996, ‘Adoption in African wild dogs, Lycaon pictus’, Journal of Zoology, 240: pp.163-173).

For situations of apparent selfless behaviour among multicellular animal species that haven’t fully (like ants, etc) or temporarily (like wolves, etc) abandoned their own sexual reproduction, we can revisit the alarm calls given by vervet monkeys, which, while they may alert other monkeys to danger, seemingly expose the caller to an increased risk of predation. A study of these monkeys showed that such calls are more likely to occur if offspring is present, suggesting kin selection (Eckhart Arnold, 2008, Explaining Altruism: A Simulation-Based Approach and Its Limits, Vol. 1, p.151 of 310). However, an alternative explanation for the calls would be, as has been mentioned, that while giving an alarm call does expose the caller to increased risk, the caller also benefits from others giving the alarm call, so that overall there is a net benefit to each member in giving alarm calls. Interestingly, when a female vervet monkey is attacked, non-relatives will often come to her aid, and studies show that the likelihood that help comes from a non-relative is strongly correlated to how recently the distressed monkey groomed its rescuer—further suggesting ‘reciprocal altruism’, where one individual helps another individual who is not necessarily related but with the expectation that the gesture will be repaid in-kind (Robert Seyfarth & Dorothy Cheney, 1984, ‘Grooming, alliances and reciprocal altruism in vervet monkeys’, Nature, 308: pp.541-543).

A study of the alarm calls given by prairie dogs found that they modified their rate of calling when closer to both offspring and non-descendant kin (cousins, etc), however, another study found that while some prairie dog individuals with nearby kin refuse to give alarm calls, others with no nearby kin do sometimes call (studies by John Hoogland; Summary of Research and Teaching for John Hoogland, accessed May 2012 at <https://www.umces.edu/sites/​default/files/al/johnresearch.pdf>). The point being that there is no definitive evidence that kin selection is influencing the behaviour of all these animals.

While it is quite common for vampire bats to fail to feed on any given night, to go without food for a couple of days is potentially fatal. To offset this risk, however, bats are known to donate blood (through regurgitation) to other members of their group who have failed to feed, thus saving them from starvation. The kin selection explanation for such behaviour is based on the claim that feeding usually occurs between individuals of the same group who are, on average, cousins. However, researchers claim that such behaviour is a case of straightforward ‘reciprocal altruism’, for since vampire bats live in small groups and associate with each other over long periods of time, the pre-conditions for ‘reciprocal altruism’ are likely to be fulfilled. Further, in the same study it was shown that bats tend to share food with their close associates, were more likely to share with others that had recently shared with them, and do not share blood easily with new members of their group—all of which suggests that these blood-sharing ties are established over time (Gerald Wilkinson, 1984, ‘Reciprocal Food Sharing in the Vampire Bat’, Nature, 308: pp.181-184; Gerald Wilkinson, 1988, ‘Reciprocal altruism in Bats and Other Mammals’, Ethology and Sociobiology, 9: pp.85-100).

A study of sun-tailed monkey communities has apparently shown that maternal kin (kin related through their mothers) behaved more preferentially towards each other, although it is claimed that once kin were removed beyond that of half-siblings this bias dropped significantly (Marie Charpentier, 2008, ‘Relatedness and Social Behaviors in Cercopithecus solatus’, International Journal of Primatology, 29 (2): pp.487-495). A possible alternative explanation for such behaviour would be that being primates these monkeys have developed some love-indoctrinated empathy for those they have been raised with.

I should mention the other variety of apparent selfless behaviour that quite obviously doesn’t involve any kin selection is the apparent selfless behaviour that occurs between different species, which is called ‘mutualism’ (the difference between ‘mutualism’ and ‘reciprocal altruism’ being that with ‘reciprocal altruism’ the benefits are spread over time rather than through a single interaction). For example, certain fish groom other species of fish to their mutual benefit, cleanliness on one hand and food on the other—a relationship that obviously involves strong sanctions against cheating; after all, were the groomed to eat its groomer it could never again use that particular groomer!

(Note again that I have described all the selfless behaviour referred to above as ‘apparent selflessness’ because all ‘selfless’ behaviour amongst animals, apart from the unconditionally selfless behaviour developed through love-indoctrination, is actually reciprocal selflessness, which means it is actually selfishness—because genes have to ensure they reproduce. All apparent selfless behaviour, outside of that which occurs through the love-indoctrination process, has to ultimately lead to the reproduction of the genes that account for that behaviour in order for that behaviour to become established, which means there is a selfish benefit to that behaviour—it is not unconditionally selfless behaviour, it is not genuinely altruistic. As such, non-human ‘selfless’ behaviour should be described as ‘apparent selfless behaviour’, or ‘apparent altruistic behaviour’, or, at the very least, have quotation marks around the world ‘selfless’ and ‘altruistic’ to indicate that such behaviour is not real or true selfless, altruistic behaviour.)

With regard to kin selection’s supposed ability to explain ‘all social behavior’, including the social behaviour ‘of human societies’—that is, to supposedly explain our unconditionally selfless, moral nature—that claim will be dealt with in the following Parts, however, I will quickly address the issue here. As briefly explained in Part 4:4D, and as will be fully explained in Part 8:4B, it was through the nurturing, love-indoctrination process that we humans acquired an instinctive orientation to behaving unconditionally selflessly towards each other, and indeed towards all of life. Humans’ capacity to behave unconditionally selflessly, such as that demonstrated by charity workers in caring for the poor and the suffering, is not based on any form of reciprocity; we humans have a moral conscience, an instinctive orientation to behaving in an unconditionally selfless, truly altruistic, genuinely loving way. It is ludicrous to suggest that through helping the poor and suffering in foreign lands a charity worker is somehow furthering their own chances of reproducing—the individuals benefitting would be entirely unrelated to the charity worker. ‘[M]isplaced parental behavior’ or ‘incidental’ ‘consequences of individual activities’ hardly explains our capacity to be universally benevolent. As the British journalist Bryan Appleyard pointed out about this fundamental flaw in kin selection, biologists ‘still have a gaping hole in an attempt to explain altruism. If, for example, I help a blind man cross the street, it is plainly unlikely that I am being prompted to do this because he is a close relation and bears my genes. And the animal world is full of all sorts of elaborate forms of cooperation which extend far beyond the boundaries of mere relatedness’ (Brave New Worlds: Staying Human in a Genetic Future, 1998, p.112). However, that ‘gaping hole’ in denial-complying, mechanistic biology’s ability to explain the truly altruistic, unconditionally-selfless-to-all-humans behaviour that we are capable of is now filled by our capacity to truthfully explain the human condition and, in so doing, safely admit the whole integrative process—namely how the process of integrating matter struggled under the limitation of genes’ inability to develop unconditional selflessness, and how our human ancestors were able to overcome that limitation through the development of love-indoctrination and develop genuinely altruistic, unconditionally-selflessly-inclined-to-all-humans-and-indeed-towards-all-of-life moral instincts.

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Before outlining exactly what is wrong with kin selection, I should mention the work of John Maynard Smith, the second of the four main architects of the kin-selection-based theory of Sociobiology.

In 1964, the same year that William Hamilton published his two papers on kin selection, Maynard Smith, who has been described as ‘legendary [in his] opposition to group selectionist thinking’ (Samir Okasha, 2005, ‘Maynard Smith on the levels of selection question’, Biology and Philosophy, Vol.20, No.5: pp.989-1010), published a paper titled ‘Group Selection and Kin Selection’ that was critical of naive group selection thinking and supported kin selection theory. It was in this paper that the term ‘kin selection’ was introduced. However, while Maynard Smith was a main player in the development of kin selection theory, he is more noted for his development of Evolutionary Game Theory (also called ESS theory for ‘evolutionarily stable strategy’). He argued that by introducing mathematical models from ‘game theory’ into the study of animal behaviour he could explain, among other things, how cooperation could evolve among non-relatives without the need for group selection. I’m not sure of the soundness or otherwise of his mathematical models, and I’m not sure that anyone else is, but what I am certain of is that to try to use evolutionary game theory in this way was another desperate effort to eliminate any recognition of the integrative process. The real significance of evolutionary game theory is its ability to demonstrate that natural selection can be an extremely subtle process. Evolutionary game theorists have put forward many models evaluating the possible penalties and benefits of different strategies and interactions between animals, some of them remarkable, if not implausible—such as arguing that situations may arise where selfless behaviour is costly but the behavioural alternatives more costly, in which case selflessness may occur without reciprocity simply because it is the more ‘cost-effective’ or less harmful alternative. What is definitely true is that over time natural selection will ensure animals are extremely finely tuned to how best to survive and reproduce. As I write this, a butcher bird is perched on the edge of the bird bath that sits outside our window. Watching him I am wondering how long natural selection would allow him to sit in the sun and indulge in its warmth—my suspicion is that survival pressures are so intense for species that every action each individual performs will have been stripped of any behaviour that is at all frivolous. I think that one day when we humans are free of the human condition and can immerse ourselves in the agony of the animal condition we are going to be shocked at just how fiercely competitive and stressed their lives are. I love animals enormously, they are my great passion, they have always been my soul’s true friend and my world is empty without them—if I was in jail I would need at least a mouse or a sparrow with me or I would die—but this love of animals doesn’t mean I need to romanticise their lives, not see their reality for what it is. Looking at life through biology only makes you more empathetic with it, not less.

I often wonder about what could be described as ‘short term successful vs long term unsuccessful’ strategies. For example, since larger males of many species tend to win out against smaller males, there must be a very strong evolutionary selection for larger size, but eventually a drought or some other devastating environmental event will occur and suddenly those with a smaller body who don’t need as much food will have the advantage and thus be better able to survive. So, supposedly males of species in this situation are at the mercy of an endless cycle of getting bigger only to then have to become smaller—but possibly natural selection does eventually find a way of avoiding these boom-bust cycles, but just what that mechanism is I am not sure. Can natural selection avoid the ‘short term successful, long term unsuccessful’ trap for example? Possibly there are game theory studies that I am not aware of that have put forward an answer to this question.

Similarly, for a long time I couldn’t believe how wasteful eucalyptus trees are. Unlike a beautifully ordered pine, or even a symmetrical oak, eucalypts have branches that grow in all directions and to different lengths, and they seem to be forever dropping dead branches and generally behaving in a chaotic way. Why hasn’t natural selection ‘tidied them up’? Eventually I worked out that eucalypts must be an ‘upstart species’—they must have hit upon a breakthrough in evolution that they are so rapidly exploiting that they haven’t had time to become refined in the new situation. Undoubtedly the breakthrough is that they are extraordinarily fire-encouraging (because of their very waxy, oily leaves and bark) and extremely fire-adapted (because of their epicormic buds that are kept protected by the outer bark but grow quickly after fire). Indeed, the fires that now erupt every 10 to 20 years in the all-dominating gum forests of Australia incinerate virtually all other wildlife, animal and vegetable, that happens to be in their path. Interestingly, in the history of Australia’s flora ‘the gums are…all but absent until a few tens of thousands of years ago’ (from a review of Ashley Hay’s 2002 book Gum, Bulletin mag. 19 Nov. 2002). It was the arrival of humans to Australia a few tens of thousands of years ago, with their practice of burning off the scrub to both trap, and later attract, game to the short regrowth, that apparently enabled these gum trees to become so pervasive because evidently fires ignited by lightning strikes are too infrequent to allow the fire-weed, gum tree monoculture to develop the way it has in Australia. If fires from lightning strikes had been numerous enough to allow for the proliferation of gums then surely eucalypts would have appeared much earlier in the fossil record. Nowadays, of course, eucalypts are so successful in Australia that it is said that every variety of plant community will be dominated by a variety of eucalypt, with the one exception perhaps being the very dry inland that still seems to be dominated by acacias. I have read that, be it heathland, scrub, open woodland or forest, ‘eucalypts always come out on top’. Australians have come to love their eucalypts but in some ways they are like dangerous crocodiles planted tail-down everywhere—a ‘predator’ at the ready.

The point I am making is that ‘the animal and plant condition’ is an amazingly complex, refined and constantly refining existence, and evolutionary game theory is an evasive, superficial, pre-human-condition-understood, old-world recognition of the extraordinary subtlety of the natural selection process.

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So what is the truth about the kin selection-based theory of Sociobiology? Certainly ant and bee and the other colonial species’ social behaviour can be explained by reciprocal selflessness—which is, of course, actually selfishness because by supporting the queen the workers are ensuring she reproduces their genes. And certainly the social behaviour of the remaining non-human multicellular animal species can also be explained by reciprocal selflessness, which again is actually selfishness because whatever apparent selfless behaviour they practice still needs to lead to the genes for that behaviour being reproduced. Both situations seemingly uphold the ‘selfishness is universal, we can’t help it if we behave selfishly because that’s the way we were born’ excuse, but the highly confronting, exposing and condemning integrative development of larger wholes (which the colonial ants and bees and the few other completely social colonial species bear such stark witness to) still needed to be eliminated. And to achieve that required the individual-only-emphasising, kin selection explanation (rather than the group/​society/​integration-recognising, ‘reciprocal altruism’-type explanation) for the apparent selfless behaviour. The question is whether the kin selection explanation for ‘all social behaviour’ is valid. (Again, the reason kin selection had to explain ‘all’ social behaviour is because any social behaviour that wasn’t able to be explained by kin selection would leave the door open to the possibility of social behaviour being evidence for Integrative Meaning. For Integrative Meaning to be avoided all social behaviour had to be able to be explained in an individual-interest-only, not integration-developing, way.)

A great deal of mathematical modeling has certainly been carried out to show how the relatedness of one individual to another might influence how much it could afford to support the other—and indeed it makes sense to me that kinship or relatedness would have been picked up by natural selection as a factor influencing reproductive success and therefore would be playing some part in the development of social/​integrated behaviour of some species. However, I am sceptical that it plays as big a part as the proponents of kin selection-based Sociobiology would have us believe—especially when there are often less complex and more straightforward biological explanations for the behaviour that don’t involve kin selection, such as those put forward in the situations described above. These examples also raise the issue of inconsistency, in that some species that share a lot of genetic material don’t behave ‘selflessly’ and cooperatively, while other species that share little do. And despite every effort having been made to do so, kin selection certainly does not explain humans’ genuinely altruistic, all loving, unconditionally selfless, moral instincts—our moral instinctive capacity to behave unconditionally selflessly towards all humans, even those who are not necessarily relatives, such as charity workers helping the poor and suffering in other countries. Again, ‘misplaced parental behavior’ or ‘incidental’ ‘consequences of individual activities’ hardly explains our capacity to be universally benevolent. Above all, given these inconsistencies, and just how horrific the agony of the human condition is, it is extremely likely that the attachment to and excessive promotion of kin selection is precisely because of its ability to deny Integrative Meaning and thus relieve us of the implications of that truth.

I now need to describe how the architect of the whole get-out-of-jail, human-condition-avoiding Sociobiology explanation for social behaviour, E.O. Wilson, himself now admits that his sociobiological theory is wrong. Yes, Wilson now admits that his whole, massive, 997-page, supposedly rigorously scientifically argued and evidenced tome is completely wrong! Sociobiology: The New Synthesis has so many mathematical equations, diagrams and charts you do suspect you are looking at the smoke and mirrors kit of an illusionist, and now its author has virtually admitted that it is indeed one big con job, although he plays it down as ‘a phantom mathematical construction’ ‘misadventure’ (The Social Conquest of Earth, 2012, pp.181, 182 of 330)! Yes, in his latest—and reportedly last—book, The Social Conquest of Earth, Wilson appears to have changed sides and stopped lying by admitting that ‘kin selection theory is…incorrect’ (p.143), is ‘inoperable’ (p.180), has ‘failed’ (p.181), and ‘does not work’ (ibid). As we are now going to see, Wilson does, to my and no doubt many others’ enormous relief, admit his Sociobiology theory is flawed; however, what will be revealed shortly is that he actually hasn’t changed his tune at all. Far from it. In fact, as has been alluded to throughout this presentation, we will see that with this new tome Wilson is actually introducing an even more sophisticated, tricky form of biological dishonesty—but, as I say, we will come to that shortly. For the present discussion, what is important is that in The Social Conquest of Earth Wilson does admit that his kin selection-based theory of Sociobiology is wrong.

Firstly, with regard to the haplodiploid hypothesis explanation for the development of ant and bee colonies that supposedly lent such powerful credence to the theory of kin selection, and which Wilson said for him ‘initially gave the [kin selection] formula its magnetic power’, in The Social Conquest of Earth Wilson has recognised that ‘In the 1960s and 1970s, almost all the species known to have evolved eusociality were in the Hymenoptera [who are haplodiploid]. Thus the haplodiploid hypothesis seemingly had powerful support…By the 1990s, however, the haplodiploid hypothesis began to fail. The termites had never fitted this model of explanation. Then, more eusocial groups of species came to light [colonial species of beetle, shrimp, aphid and mole rats] that were diplodiploid [where the haplodiploid hypothesis doesn’t hold true] rather than haplodiploid in sex determination’ (p.170). So, the haplodiploid hypothesis argument that was said to powerfully validate the theory of kin selection has been found to be unsustainable.

The most important concession in The Social Conquest of Earth is, however, Wilson’s acknowledgement that the whole principle of kin selection’s emphasis on the individual at the exclusion of the social, integrative process is fundamentally wrong. In explaining why, Wilson makes the same point I have always made, which is that it is the development and maintenance of the larger whole that is the objective of the natural selection process. As I said earlier, ‘the individual parts (eyes, legs, heart, etc) of our body (and, the completely social colonies of animals do represent a fully integrated cooperate whole like a body) work to support the maintenance of our entire being, they are not working for themselves; it is the body as a whole that is the concern or focus or purpose of their existence.’ In The Social Conquest of Earth, Wilson wrote that (the underlinings are my emphasis) ‘The workers [in the completely social/​integrated—what Wilson calls ‘eusocial’—ant, bee, termite, wasp, beetle, shrimp, aphid, mole rat and a few other colonies]…are extensions of the queen’s phenotype, in other words alternative expressions of her personal genes and those of the male with whom she mated. In effect, the workers are robots she has created in her image that allow her to generate more queens and males than would be possible if she were solitary…the origin and evolution of eusocial insects…is best tracked from queen to queen…with the workers…extensions of the mother queen. The queen and her offspring are often called superorganisms, but they may equally be called organisms. The worker…is part of the queen’s phenotype, as teeth and fingers are part of your own phenotype [pp.143-144] …[Kin selection theory, where] colonial evolution is regarded as the interests of the individual worker pitted against the interests of its colony, may no longer be a useful concept on which to build models of genetic evolution in social insects [p.146]’. Yes, it is the ‘colony’, not the ‘individual worker’, that matters. Wilson went on to describe how Darwin also ‘solved the puzzle’ ‘of how sterile workers could evolve by natural selection’ by realising ‘the mother queen and her progeny together are the target of selection by the external environment. The ant colony is a family, he [Darwin] suggested, and “selection may be applied to the family, as well as to the individual, and may thus gain the desired end” [The Origin of Species, ch.7]’ (The Social Conquest of Earth, pp.146-147). Yes, ‘the mother queen and her progeny together are the target of selection’ because that is the sexually reproducing individual, not the individual worker. The ‘ant colony’ constitutes the sexually reproducing individual, which competes with other sexually reproducing individual colonies.

In The Social Conquest of Earth Wilson further disowns kin selection theory because he, like me, believes there are often more straightforward explanations for apparent selfless behaviour than those involving kin selection. He wrote: ‘Even in the most meticulously analyzed cases presented by various authors as evidence for kin selection, it has been easy to devise explanations from standard natural-selection theory that are at least equally valid. They entail straightforward individual or group selection, or both. Kin selection may occur, but there is no case that presents compelling explanation for its role as the driving force of evolution’ (p.175). He goes on to give examples, including some that I have provided above, of how ‘straightforward individual or group selection’ explanations can be ‘at least equally valid’ as ‘kin selection’ explanations. (I should emphasise that my support of ‘group selection’ is only in so far as it concerns selection occurring between groups where the group is one sexually reproducing individual, such as a multicellular organism or an ant colony, not in regard to selection occurring between groups with sexually reproducing individuals, which, as we will see later when Wilson’s 2012 book The Social Conquest of Earth is more fully described, is an interpretation Wilson has for group selection that I don’t agree with.) He also recognises the inconsistency problem, stating that ‘relatedness can be identical in two systems yet cooperation is favoured in one system and not in the other. Conversely, two populations can have relatedness measures on the opposite ends of the spectrum and yet both structures be equally unable to support the evolution of cooperation’ (p.181). He then concludes with this statement: ‘Kin selection, if it occurs at all in animals, must be a weak form of selection that occurs only in special conditions easily violated’ (p.181). Yes, ‘there is no case that presents compelling explanation for its [kin selection’s] role as the driving force of evolution’, and the reason is because the real driving force of evolution is the development of order of matter, the integration of ever larger and more stable wholes—a process that Wilson virtually admits when he writes of the development of ‘levels of biological organization, from molecule to population’ (p.173). The old evasive ‘evolution-is-not-a-directed-but-random-process’ is slipping and integration/​‘God’ is poking its head into biological thinking! But not very far—for as we will shortly see, despite his renouncement of his former lies, with his new book Wilson actually takes biology on a whole new, even more outrageously dishonest course than he did with kin selection.