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New York Times,
September 18, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/18/health/18ALTR.html?ex=1001832829&ei=1&en=a
For the wordless, formless, expectant citizens of tomorrow, here
are some postcards of all that matters today:
Minutes after terrorists slam jet planes into the towers of the
World Trade Center, streams of harrowed humanity crowd the
emergency stairwells, heading in two directions. While terrified
employees scramble down, toward exit doors and survival, hundreds
of New York firefighters, each laden with 70 to 100 pounds of
lifesaving gear, charge upward, never to be seen again.
As the last of four hijacked planes advances toward an unknown
but surely populated destination, passengers huddle together and
plot resistance against their captors, an act that may explain why
the plane fails to reach its target, crashing instead into an empty
field outside Pittsburgh.
Hearing of the tragedy whose dimensions cannot be charted or
absorbed, tens of thousands of people across the nation storm their
local hospitals and blood banks, begging for the chance to give
blood, something of themselves to the hearts of the wounded - and
the heart of us all - beating against the void.
Altruism and heroism. If not for these twin radiant badges of our
humanity, there would be no us, and we know it. And so, when their
vile opposite threatened to choke us into submission last Tuesday,
we rallied them in quantities so great we surprised even ourselves.
Nothing and nobody can fully explain the source of the emotional
genius that has been everywhere on display. Politicians have cast
it as evidence of the indomitable spirit of a rock-solid America;
pastors have given credit to a more celestial source. And while
biologists in no way claim to have discovered the key to human
nobility, they do have their own spin on the subject. The
altruistic impulse, they say, is a nondenominational gift, the
birthright and defining characteristic of the human species.
As they see it, the roots of altruistic behavior far predate Homo
sapiens, and that is why it seems to flow forth so readily once
tapped. Recent studies that model group dynamics suggest that a
spirit of cooperation will arise in nature under a wide variety of
circumstances.
"There's a general trend in evolutionary biology toward
recognizing that very often the best way to compete is to
cooperate," said Dr. Barbara Smuts, a professor of anthropology at
the University of Michigan, who has published papers on the
evolution of altruism. "And that, to me, is a source of some solace
and comfort."
Moreover, most biologists concur that the human capacity for
language and memory allows altruistic behavior - the desire to
give, and to sacrifice for the sake of others - to flourish in
measure far beyond the cooperative spirit seen in other species.
With language, they say, people can learn of individuals they have
never met and feel compassion for their suffering, and honor and
even emulate their heroic deeds. They can also warn one another of
any selfish cheaters or malign tricksters lurking in their midst.
"In a large crowd, we know who the good guys are, and we can
talk
about, and ostracize, the bad ones," said Dr. Craig Packer, a
professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Minnesota.
"People are very concerned about their reputation, and that, too,
can inspire us to be good."
Oh, better than good.
"There's a grandness in the human species that is so striking,
and
so profoundly different from what we see in other animals," he
added. "We are an amalgamation of families working together. This
is what civilization is derived from."
At the same time, said biologists, the very conditions that
encourage heroics and selflessness can be the source of profound
barbarism as well. "Moral behavior is often a within-group
phenomenon," said Dr. David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology at
the State University of New York at Binghamton. "Altruism is
practiced within your group, and often turned off toward members of
other groups."
The desire to understand the nature of altruism has occupied
evolutionary thinkers since Charles Darwin, who was fascinated by
the apparent existence of altruism among social insects. In ant and
bee colonies, sterile female workers labor ceaselessly for their
queen, and will even die for her when the nest is threatened. How
could such seeming selflessness evolve, when it is exactly those
individuals that are behaving altruistically that fail to breed and
thereby pass their selfless genes along?
By a similar token, human soldiers who go to war often are at the
beginning of their reproductive potential, and many are killed
before getting the chance to have children. Why don't the
stay-at-homes simply outbreed the do-gooders and thus bury the
altruistic impulse along with the casualties of combat?
The question of altruism was at least partly solved when the
British evolutionary theorist William Hamilton formulated the idea
of inclusive fitness: the notion that individuals can enhance their
reproductive success not merely by having young of their own, but
by caring for their genetic relatives as well. Among social bees
and ants, it turns out, the sister workers are more closely related
to one another than parents normally are to their offspring; thus
it behooves the workers to care more about current and potential
sisters than to fret over their sterile selves.
The concept of inclusive fitness explains many brave acts observed
in nature. Dr. Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard, cites
the example of the red colobus monkey. When they are being hunted
by chimpanzees, the male monkeys are "amazingly brave," Dr.
Wrangham said. "As the biggest and strongest members of their
group, they undoubtedly could escape quicker than the others."
Instead, the males jump to the front, confronting the chimpanzee
hunters while the mothers and offspring jump to safety. Often, the
much bigger chimpanzees pull the colobus soldiers off by their
tails and slam them to their deaths.
Their courageousness can be explained by the fact that colobus
monkeys live in multimale, multifemale groups in which the males
are almost always related. So in protecting the young monkeys, the
adult males are defending their kin.
Yet, as biologists are learning, there is more to cooperation and
generosity than an investment in one's nepotistic patch of DNA.
Lately, they have accrued evidence that something like group
selection encourages the evolution of traits beneficial to a group,
even when members of the group are not related.
In computer simulation studies, Dr. Smuts and her colleagues
modeled two types of group-living agents that would behave like
herbivores: one that would selfishly consume all the food in a
given patch before moving on, and another that would consume
resources modestly rather than greedily, thus allowing local plant
food to regenerate.
Researchers had assumed that cooperators could collaborate with
genetically unrelated cooperators only if they had the cognitive
capacity to know goodness when they saw it.
But the data suggested otherwise. "These models showed that
under
a wide range of simulated environmental conditions you could get
selection for prudent, cooperative behavior," Dr. Smuts said, even
in the absence of cognition or kinship. "If you happened by chance
to get good guys together, they remained together because they
created a mutually beneficial environment."
This sort of win-win principle, she said, could explain all sorts
of symbiotic arrangements, even among different species - like the
tendency of baboons and impalas to associate together because they
use each other's warning calls.
Add to this basic mechanistic selection for cooperation the human
capacity to recognize and reward behaviors that strengthen the
group - the tribe, the state, the church, the platoon - and
selflessness thrives and multiplies. So, too, does the need for
group identity. Classic so-called minimal group experiments have
shown that when people are gathered together and assigned
membership in arbitrary groups, called, say, the Greens and the
Reds, before long the members begin expressing amity for their
fellow Greens or Reds and animosity toward those of the wrong
"color."
"Ancestral life frequently consisted of intergroup
conflict," Dr.
Wilson of SUNY said. "It's part of our mental heritage."
Yet he does not see conflict as inevitable. "It's been shown
pretty well that where people place the boundary between us and
them is extremely flexible and strategic," he said. "It's
possible
to widen the moral circle, and I'm optimistic enough to believe it
can be done on a worldwide scale."
Ultimately, though, scientists acknowledge that the evolutionary
framework for self-sacrificing acts is overlaid by individual
choice. And it is there, when individual firefighters or office
workers or airplane passengers choose the altruistic path that
science gives way to wonder.
Dr. James J. Moore, a professor of anthropology at the University
of California at San Diego, said he had studied many species,
including many different primates. "We're the nicest species I
know," he said. "To see those guys risking their lives, climbing
over rubble on the chance of finding one person alive, well, you
wouldn't find baboons doing that." The horrors of last week
notwithstanding, he said, "the overall picture to come out about
human nature is wonderful."
"For every 50 people making bomb threats now to mosques,"
he said,
"there are 500,000 people around the world behaving just the way we
hoped they would, with empathy and expressions of grief. We are
amazingly civilized."
True, death-defying acts of heroism may be the province of the
few. For the rest of us, simple humanity will do.
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