In a world supposedly governed by ruthless survival of the fittest, why do we see acts of goodness in both animals and humans? This problem plagued Charles Darwin in the 1850s as he developed his theory of evolution through natural selection. Indeed, Darwin worried that the goodness he observed in nature could be the Achilles heel of his theory. Ever since then, scientists and other thinkers have engaged in a fierce debate about the origins of goodness that has dragged politics, philosophy, and religion into what remains a major question for evolutionary biology.
The Altruism Equation traces the history of this debate from Darwin to the present through an extraordinary cast of characters-from the Russian prince Petr Kropotkin, who wanted to base society on altruism, to the brilliant biologist George Price, who fell into poverty and succumbed to suicide as he obsessed over the problem. In a final surprising turn, William Hamilton, the scientist who came up with the equation that reduced altruism to the cold language of natural selection, desperately hoped that his theory did not apply to humans.
Author(s): Lee Alan Dugatkin
Edition: 1
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Year: 2006
Language: English
Commentary: HDSS
Pages: 224
Title page
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter One - A Special Difficulty That Might Prove Fatal
Chapter Two - Darwin’s Bulldog versus the Prince of Evolution
Chapter Three - The Greatest Word from Science since Darwin
Chapter Four - J.B.S.: The Last Man Who Might Know All There Was to Be Known
Chapter Five - Hamilton’s Rule
Chapter Six - The Price of Kinship
Chapter Seven - Spreading the Word
Chapter Eight - Keepers of the Flame
Chapter Nine - Curator of Mathematical Models
Notes
Index