In Our Time - Altruism

Episode Date: November 23, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss altruism. The term altruism was coined by the 19th century sociologist Auguste Comte and is derived from the Latin “alteri” or "the others”. It describes an unselfish attention to the needs of others. Comte declared that man had a moral duty to “serve humanity, whose we are entirely.” The idea of altruism is central to the main religions: Jesus declared “you shall love your neighbour as yourself” and Mohammed said “none of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself”. Buddhism too advocates “seeking for others the happiness one desires for oneself.”Philosophers throughout time have debated whether such benevolence towards others is rooted in our natural inclinations or is a virtue we must impose on our nature through duty, religious or otherwise. Then in 1859 Darwin’s ideas about competition and natural selection exploded onto the scene. His theories outlined in the Origin of Species painted a world “red in tooth and claw” as every organism struggles for ascendancy.So how does this square with altruism? If both mankind and the natural world are selfishly seeking to promote their own survival and advancement, how can we explain being kind to others, sometimes at our own expense? How have philosophical ideas about altruism responded to evolutionary theory? And paradoxically, is it possible that altruism can, in fact, be selfish?With Miranda Fricker, Senior Lecturer in the School of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London; Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University; John Dupré, Professor of Philosophy of Science at Exeter University and director of Egenis, the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, the term altruism was coined by the 19th century sociologist August Kant. It's derived from the Latin altery or the others. It describes an unselfish attention to the needs of others. The idea of altruism is central to the main religions.

Jesus declared, you shall love your neighbour as yourself. Mohammed said, none of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother, what he wishes for himself. Buddhism too advocates seeking for others the happiness one desires for oneself. Philosophers have debated whether such benevolence towards others is rooted in our natural inclinations or is a virtue we must impose on our nature through duty. Then in 1859 came Darwin's ideas about natural selection and the survival of those fittest. His theories outlined in the original species were interpreted as painting a world red in tooth and claw.

So, if both mankind and the natural world are selfishly seeking to promote their own survival and advancement, how can we explain being kind to others sometimes at our own expense? How have philosophical ideas about altruism responded to evolutionary theory, and is it possible that altruism can, in fact, be selfish? With me to discuss this is Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and the Charles Simonius Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, Miranda Fricker, Senior Lecture in the School of Philosophy at Birkbeck College University of London, and John Dupre, Professor of the Philosopher,

of Science at Exeter University. John Dupre, let's begin by putting the idea of altruism in some kind of historical context. Right. Well, I mean, I suppose the, I mean, the first thing you say is altruism is a very everyday simple idea. It's simply that an altruistic act is an act which takes some account of the interests of somebody other than the actor. It's generally contrasted with egoism. And as defined that way, it might sound just like not being sociopathic. and you might wonder why there's so much debate about it. I think to understand why it's become such an issue probably is useful to take a bit more historical context. You can see that there are sort of related debates

that go on in antiquity. The classic location might be the first book of the republic where Socrates has a famous debate with Thrasimachus who presents himself as an egoist who has no interest in anybody's concerns. turns other than his own and will do anything he can if he can get away with it at any cost to anybody. And Socrates's argument there is to convince him that actually this really isn't his own interest, that pursuing his own interest, pursuing what is really the good of his soul,

requires a concern with justice and justice doing what's good for you, produces happiness, so he's just confused. And I think that's a very traditional idea about, egoism is that it's some kind of mistake. I think that the Aristotle provides a really nice context with this because for Aristotle, the whole of nature is a kind of harmonious harmony. The parts of things have particular functions or telos, which is ultimately to be understood in their contribution to the whole that they're part of.

So that then the humans as social animals, part of their telos is to contribute to the good of society. Now I think that that's the general picture is like this, though there are kind of influences from Christianity, the idea of the individual soul that start to change things.

But it's really in the democratic bourgeois revolution that we first get a notion of a fundamental conflict between levels of organisation. So the individual, the political problem in the 17th, 18th century is the relation of the individual to the state and it comes to be

seen as a kind of conflict so that the interests of the individual are always potentially in conflict with those of other people, with the state at large. And this gives rise to a real problem of how you get people to behave in ways that are conducive to the good of other people, and we start getting this issue about altruism. Does the act of, just to define it once more before we move on, does the act of altruistic benevolence always have to have a cost to the person who can. carries out this act? Does that make it out of it if it does cost to the person? Well, I think

this, again, is a very recent conception. I mean, I think, as I say, in the case of the Greeks, the idea would be it was only, it would be a confusion to suppose that it was bad for you to take account of the interests of others. You would just be

philosophically mistaken. So, of course, what they're saying is the nature of people, the realization of which is going to make them happy, is to take account of other people's interests. So there shouldn't be a cost. I think it's the rise of individualism,

the idea of ultimately value residing solely in the individual, and therefore there's no actual benefit in other people's good that starts to create the idea that there's bound to be a cost in considering other people's interests. Richard Dawkins, we're going to come on substantially to Darwin, but at this early stage in the programme, does this scientific background that you come, as well as the larger cultural background you come from.

Has that greatly altered the argument as being put forward by John Dupre? Well, I think that nature read in tooth and claw, the Tennyson phrase that you quoted earlier, is a pretty accurate summing up of Darwinism. And therefore, within the world of Darwinism, the idea of the telos of people as being the benefit of society or something like that.

It's a very, very undarwinian idea. We shall obviously come to that. So that in a sense, for a Darwinian, the natural state would be naively thought to be selfishness. And it's altruism that requires an explanation rather than to say that altruism is the natural state and selfishness requires an explanation. So how would you regard what John has been talking about

in terms of the way the Greeks laid it out? Well, I'm interested in. it as a historical phenomenon, but I don't find it illuminating to the way I think of it as a post-Darwinian. There seem to be different ways, so there are different ways of interpreting altruism. Is that what we're saying at the outset? Do you find attention there then? Well, certainly the idea of a cost, which was one of the things you asked John Dupre was, that's a very, very Darwinian idea. I mean, everything has a cost in a Darwinian world. And so an altruistic act in nature would be one that imposes a cost upon the giver of the altruistic act, yes.

Miranda Afrika, before we go on to Darwin, who looms already in this discussion, let's look at a couple of philosophers what they were thinking about altruism before Darwin. Can we start with Hume, who took on this subject? Yes, I mean, Hume might be described as a naturalist in the sense that he thought that ethics generally, the virtues including, well, altruistic motives, grow out of human nature. He, in particular, thought that most virtues, in fact, were what he classed as natural virtues. So he thought that they had great long catalogue of them and different sorts, so benevolence being the one that's most relevant to altruism perhaps,

but also charity, kindness, generosity, even wit, all sorts of different, not especially moralistic-sounding virtues. He thought were character traits that we naturally admired. and furthermore character traits which to some extent we naturally have. What did you mean by naturally? Well, he just meant that as it, well, the contrast is with his notion of artificial, which means that I'll come to perhaps later, but it means that something would be classed as an artificial virtue

if explaining why we admire it requires one to refer to a particular, what he called a human contrivance, a particular institution, for instance. And he thought this about the institution of property rights. I can come to that in a moment. So for him the notion of natural is opposed to the notion of artificial, which is what we might call something more like a social institution. And of course he had nothing, and it wasn't, as it were, able yet to have anything Darwinian in mind. He was just thinking of what comes naturally to most human beings.

The most basic impulse, the most basic response is what he called sympathy, which is simply our capacity to feel someone else's pain. And it's from that basic emotional capacity that other moral responses come. He thought moral responses were emotional responses, sentimental responses. They weren't a matter of rationality. And that, however, it's not the case that any emotional response to a wrong counts as a genuine moral response. It needs to be corrected for certain two biases of what he called proximity

to counter the genuine moral response. So, for instance, I observe a wrong done to my brother. I will naturally have a much stronger natural response of abhorrence to that act than to the same wrong done to a perfect stranger. And in Hume's view, in order to convert my immediate spontaneous response of sympathy into a genuine moral response, I need to correct for that proximity, my personal involvement with my brother as opposed to the stranger. Similarly, wrongs that we observe right here right now,

as opposed to wrongs we just hear of in some distant place. Those two forms of proximity need to be corrected for. And as it were, a modern philosopher might want to say, well, that's reason doing that. creating that disinterested point of view, but Hume wouldn't want to put it that way. He just wants to say that moral responses are, on the whole, natural, sentimental responses to other people's pain, and they count as moral responses so long as they're corrected for and achieve a certain disinterestedness. Corrected by reason and imagination.

Well, I would say they're corrected by reason and imagination. I think it's probably, I wouldn't want to put those words in Hume's own mouth, but an entirely reasonable and uncontroversial interpretation would be to say that, for whom moral responses are emotional but framed or, as it were, underpinned by reason in that way. John Duprey, can you tell us where Emmanuel Kant fits into this progression? Well, I suppose for Kant, altruism isn't really a very important concept in a certain way because he's a great rationalist of the age of reason. And Kant's project was to try and understand morality as something rationally compelling.

Indeed, I mean, Kant is sometimes, I think, without complete unfairness, accused of holding that if somebody had a kind of benevolent feeling towards somebody that actually detracted from the virtue of the action because Kant thought that the really, you know, the truly virtuous thing was to act out of one's rational perception of duty. And any other motive like a sentiment was something of a detraction from that. But it's a purety. It doesn't mean to the absurdity. You visit your best friend in hospital. You're doing it out of duty, not because he's your best or he is your best friend. That's right.

And I think ultimately you're right. It's an absurdity and Kant's rationalist ethics is rather widely perceived as a sort of brilliant failure, just for that kind of reason, or that it just doesn't take account of the importance of human nature, the kind of humian considerations, which I think ultimately, are much more powerful in addressing these issues.

Richard Dawkins, what's your reaction to the naturalness? I asked Miranda Fricker what you meant by natural. What is your reaction to the explanation then given? Well, I should have to come back to that when we move on to Darwinism. I suppose the big problem that a Darwinist faces, as I said before, is to explain empathy, naturally. altruism which seems to go to run counter to our Darwinian programming. And it really does seem as though we subjectively feel empathy in a way that a naive interpretation of Darwinism would think that we shouldn't.

I mean, we're too nice for Darwinian tastes would be one way to put it. I think it will be a challenge, but it is a challenge to Darwinians to explain why we're so nice. and to give some sort of Darwinian account of that, which will be more sophisticated than the naive one which one first thinks of. Well, finally, before we hit, we crossed the Atlantic and hit Darwin head on, I want you just, Miranda Frick, if you could tell us where the utilitarians fit into this, with Jeremy Bentham and his godson John Stuart Mill in the 19th century mill. Yes, and I mean that's another quite different take on morality, so to speak.

John Strait Mill, profoundly influenced by Jeremy Bentham before him, embraced a view which actually can be defined terribly quickly. The greatest happiness principle requires us to acknowledge that actions are right insofar as they tend to promote human happiness and wrong insofar as they tend to detract from it. So it actually obliges us to think always about the consequences of our actions and when we're considering what to do, think only about the consequences of the actions and their impact in terms of the general happiness. So built into that greatest happiness principle, we can see already there's a very strong commitment to altruism. You have to think of everybody's interests as it were as counting equally. Now, I think Mill probably being a humane liberal, didn't intend his view to be interpreted in terms of a permanent obligation to maximize general happiness no matter what you're doing.

I think he conceived of it as we go about our normal everyday business, engage in the projects that make our lives meaningful and so on. And when we're faced with real questions about whether to do A or B, we better think in relation to consequences. But actually, as he states the view, and so simply, it does seem to be very vulnerable to the interpretation that it's massively overdemanding. What did you do today? We got up and we came to work and we came to the program.

Maybe this was not a maximizing strategy, popular though the program may be. I'm sure there were things we could have all done, which would have been better maximisers of the general happiness. Now, that famous too demanding objection is a big problem with utilitarianism of that form. And one way of putting it is that it makes benevolence, the virtue that's relevant to altruism, the only virtue and forgets all the other virtues which go into making a good, including an ethically good life.

So I think perhaps it's, in a sense, the altruistic moral theory par excellence, but for that very reason it's not a realistic or attractive view of moral life. So we've mentioned, John's mentioned, Plato and Aristotle, we've looked at a little but still looked at, I thought, very succinctly, and with inside Hume and Kant and now Mill. And let's come to Darwin, Richard Dawkins. Can you explain why in the intellectual context of the time, his view of the way life is lived

and the way we behave to each other and consequently of innate goodness and so and seemed so devastating. Well, the thing that was really devastating about Darwin I think was not so much that as the demonstration that we're all related to other animals, including apes. But natural selection was Darwin's account of the driving force of evolution

and in particular how it becomes to be, how things become to be adapted. Natural selection is about survival, the survival of the fittest, the phrase that Darwin adopted from Spencer. That means reproduction, that means survival to reproduce. And so what is being maximized in the Darwinian world

is something pretty basic. It's personal survival, personal reproduction. Darwin already, the origin of species faced up to two dilemmas about which nowadays we would think of as to do with altruism. One was humans who seemed to Darwin to be too good. And he accounted for them with something approaching what we now call group selection, the idea that selection doesn't choose between individuals, which in all other respects Darwin said it did.

I mean, Darwin was a very staunch individual man. but Darwin switched to the group in a manner of speaking when worrying about why humans are altruistic and he suggested that the tribe or the clan whose individual members were altruistic would be more likely to survive than the tribe or clan which didn't and would be more likely to produce almost daughter tribes

I mean it was sort of a spawning of tribes so that was one thing that Darwin faced up to but did actually did that fit in with it? Do you think that really fitted in with the basic theory, or is that sort of... Well, not to me it doesn't. I mean, that goes against Darwin's fundamental belief in the individual as being the level at which things work. But the other test case that Darwin faced up to was the social insects.

And nowadays we think of the social insects, where worker bees sting and then die because they sting, where worker ants work and work and work for the good of the colony and don't reproduce themselves. Now that's in a sense a very altruistic thing to do. Darwin wasn't so worried about that. What Darwin was worried about was how it could be that the adaptations of a worker ant or a worker bee

could get passed on since they never had any children. They're sterile. So nowadays we think of that as being the ultimate act of Darwinian altruism to be sterile and to work for the re-exam. reproductive success of others. Darwin thought of the dilemma as how can it be that worker bees, worker ants, worker termites develop these really quite sophisticated and detailed adaptations

for being workers, but workers never have any children. And so how did it get passed on? And Darwin very, very clearly and cleverly solved that by pointing out that he used an analogy from domestic animals. He said, when you're breeding cattle for meat, the cow or the ox that you eat is dead, but you can look at its meat and decide whether it's good, and then in Darwin's phrase, you go with confidence to the stock.

So you don't breed from the individual who's died. You breed from the relations of the individual. You breed from the same mother or the same father. So that was Darwin's approach to the social insects, and it's very easily adapted to explain why worker insects are altruistic towards the rest of the colony. But where does that put, John Duprey, where does that put, to carry on from Richard, where does that put us human beings in this? Well, I think I have to say I'm not entirely in agreement with Richard Dawkins on the interpretation of Darwin.

So, I mean, it's going to be two points about Darwin that might give a slightly different picture of us. First, I mean, Darwin, of course, is mostly famous for the theory of natural selection. But there's an enormous amount in Darwin, even in the origin, about the harmony of life, the way things fit together. And this is something that I think he was very clearly aware of the need to explain. And also, it's also worth noting that Darwin became increasingly skeptical of whether natural selection was sufficient. to account for evolution. And indeed, he clearly, by the end of his life, he was quite sure it wasn't. And I suspect that he may actually be right,

that there's much more to evolution than the trajectory that has led us to see everything in terms of natural selection. In terms of natural selection, I'm less unsympathetic to the group selection argument than I think Richard Dawkins is. And I think part of the problem is that we have, on the one hand, we think we know what an individual is. You know, as you and me were individuals. But of course, this is a theoretical concept in evolutionary theory. It's whatever is being selected.

Now, it seems to me things are selected at a whole range of levels of complexity, certainly including social groups. And even in terms of the concept of the individual, we often don't think of the fact that, you know, 90% of the cells we carry around aren't human. the microbes that live in us, that get selected with us, without which we would be quite non-functional. So, I mean, what individuals are being selected is a very difficult question. And certainly, I think, in the case of humans, there are aspects of sociality. We're social animals, not in just the way the insects are,

but we're just as social as they are in a different way. And certainly I think society is a part of what's being selected, what's competing. I'm sure Richard will want to come back up, but Miranda Frecker once again first. Just carrying on from that point about human beings' sociality, that we are influenced not only by natural impulses but also cultural impulses. I wanted to raise a question of how far Darwinian explanations of altruism need be reductive. If I understand both other speakers correctly, I don't think either of them wants to, as it were, explain altruism away

so that we end up with a sort of cynical view that there aren't really, altruistic acts, there's only some other selfish acts going on, disguised as altruism, and the whole thing's just a sort of pretense. On the contrary, it seems to me there's at least two different levels of explanation that are available when human beings do apparently altruistic acts. One is at the level of psychological explanation and human motive, in which case Darwinian needs pose no threat to that level explanation. When you ask why your friend came to visit you in hospital, the kind of answer one want is an answer expression. at the level of her motivations.

And as she said, oh, well, it's to do with natural selection. You just think that she needed help. So, but then that leaves the other deeper level of explanation open. And one possible explanation that the prime candidate is that it might be a Darwinian one. And so there need be no reduction of altruism to selfish impulses at the Darwinian level, even if one buys the Darwinian story. Richard. Well, I want to come back to what John was.

was saying, I don't find words like the harmony of nature helpful. Of course, in a sense, there is harmony. But it's harmony, it's not that there is some large unit which is being selected for its harmoniousness. What's going on is that

the units at the lower level are being selected for their capacity to harmonize with other units at that lower level. So to the extent that it benefits a low level individual in the hierarchy of life that John referred, referred to, to the extent that it benefits a low-level individual to act in harmony with other

such low-level entities, it will do so. But it's a confusion and an obscurity to suggest that there's some kind of a higher-level selection, favoring a harmonious unit. Now, there might be, but you don't have to postulate that in order to explain harmony in nature. And I prefer not to. I think it doesn't really help. John is right to say that some people do propose selection going on at different levels. I think that too is

probably a confusion. There is a sense in which selection goes on at higher levels, but it's always fundamentally got to be perhaps I'm jumping ahead here, it's got to be the survival of coded information

which goes on into the future. That means genes. That's not how how Darwin would have put it, although I think Darwin would have been sympathetic to that view if he lived, if he knew about Mendelian genetics. So I think I just want to disagree with John about his interpretation of Darwinism. I also should say, of course, that when he says that Darwin later in life became somewhat disenchanted with natural selection, it's true that the sixth edition of the origin is a great step backwards compared to the first edition.

in my view. I mean, it's true that by then, I forget who the wit was who said, by the sixth edition, it should have been called on the origin of species by means of natural selection and all sorts of other things. That was a pity,

because what Darwin was doing was responding to criticisms which I think he shouldn't have bothered with. Do you want to quick... Well, I think that that title, I mean, actually the sixth edition was quite visionary in that way. I mean, in the sense that I think we're now, as we understand biology so much better in the last few decades,

we're beginning to see there's all kinds of potential for other kinds of adaptive mechanism. And even, I guess, the most excoriated figure in biology, Le Marck, I think, is making a clear comeback. There are lots of mechanisms that we now understand that do give potential for inheritance of acquired characteristics. So it seems to me that we need to be much more open about, the set of processes that can be involved. And I guess I think the view which is certainly very widely held, and Richard has done much to make it widely held, that the only thing that can ultimately be selected is coding,

I think is, I don't think, is, you know, well argued for in the end. Well, we're going to come to that in a moment or two. But there's the elephant in the room that hasn't struck yet now. How about that for metaphor? We have to bring in the religious notion here just to discuss it, and then we can put it aside and move on. But for a lot of people to behave well to other people is part of their religion, is because their religion tells them to do so and they follow believers.

Now, how did, and that took a huge knock with Tao, and had to take a knock from other people before, then, of course, no civilization without the single God figure. and so on. But can you just say a little bit about that in the context of the 19th century and what's happened since? Yes, yes. Or may I start with the 18th century? I mean, it's human can to the two key Enlightenment figures, I think, to talk about here. I mean, when one thinks of enlightenment thinking, one thinks immediately the idea that one can construct moral authority, construct the nature of what stands behind moral obligations without having to refer to God. Now in Hume, writing in the first part of the 18th century, he was sort of famously, slightly dangerously, a bit of a skeptic about religion.

He wrote a piece of miracles, which famously argued that it could never be rational to accept an account of a miracle, roughly speaking, because on balance the evidence would always be more in favour of the view that the person was lying or mistaken than that they were correct. But he doesn't place the emphasis on human reason in the typical manner. of the Enlightenment. He places the emphasis on human sentiment, as we've seen. Now, by contrast, another perhaps even more important Enlightenment figure, Kant, I say more important enlightenment figure because he famously wrote a piece and answer to the question, what is enlightenment, just a bit more than halfway through the 18th century, where he identified the motto of Enlightenment thinking as Sapere out, dare to think for yourself, which is a pretty

good motto, it seems to me. And for Kant, of course, reason, as John has already made clear was absolutely the heart of morality, but moral feeling, altruistic feeling, sentiments of any sort, were in a sense the enemy of doing an action of moral worse, since he thought that the only thing that gives an action moral worth is that it comes from the motive of duty, doing duty for duty's sake, purely formal idea. But what's, I think, rather amusing about Kant's position vis-à-vis God

and the nature of moral authority is that Kant was himself a theist, and God plays a part in Kant's philosophy elsewhere, but Kant thought that he'd observed an ordinary popular moral thinking. Two things. One thing I've already mentioned, namely that moral worth is in the motive, the motive of duty. And secondly, that moral obligations, if there are any real moral obligations,

are absolutely binding. Now this means that nothing about the subject, his sentiments, his interests, his inclinations, his habits of thought, could possibly release him from a moral obligation as such. Now the trouble about belief in God is that it looks like if you just don't believe or you don't care that you're going to burn in hell for all eternity

then the thou shalt not won't really apply to you because something subjective in you is so to speak letting you off the hook so he constructs this absolutely authoritative moral system supposedly without any reference to God whatever in terms of the authority of moral obligation and places it all in something that no human being

can possibly escape namely their capacity for practical reason. So when we act, we must always ask ourselves whether we're acting on a reason that anyone else could accept, a universalizable reason. And if not, we must refrain and we've discovered we have a duty to refrain. That's how he gets duties out of what he calls the categorical imperative, this requirement to act only on universalizable reason. So he's an Enlightenment thinker that's a theist, but has such a strong conception of moral authority that God isn't, a belief in God won't do. And Richard Dawkins succumbed to the final section of the programme. Just as it were to

add a little postcript to what Miranda said. The notion of God being the provider of morality and therefore the source of fine feelings like culturalism was stripped back very strongly by Darwin Red. It was stripped away very strongly there. Well insofar as the notion of God at all was stripped back by Darwin. I do think it's a rather odd idea that one needs religion to be right to be righteous. I mean, it does suggest a kind of looking over one's shoulder

at the great surveillance camera in the sky and only doing good because you're afraid of being found out, which is not a very moral approach perhaps. Can I just come in move on that? You took on Darwin's ideas forward as it when you came up with a selfish gene explanation which the very word selfish played in all sorts of ways and gets us to the basis of this really. Is there something basically about us that is anti-altruistic,

and do we have to build that by other means? Can you tell us where you are with that? No, I don't think there necessarily has to be because it is, after all, the selfish gene, not the selfish individual, nor the selfish group or the selfish ecosystem. system. The selfish gene simply means that those DNA codes that survive are the ones that survive, and any DNA code that goes out of its way to help another one is unlikely to become more numerous in the gene pool. So at the level of the gene, we can expect selfishness.

But the whole point of the idea of the selfish gene is that that doesn't have to mean that individuals are selfish. and Darwin himself realized this in other terms. So looking after your own relatives, especially perhaps offspring people used to think, but then later Hamilton showed it didn't have to be offspring, it could be other relatives, or looking after other individuals who are likely to reciprocate the favour. Both those could be favoured by selfish genes,

looking after their own selfish interests, programming individuals to be altruistic. And that's really, I mean, when you say I introduced the selfishity, and I merely gave it a name. I mean, that was in my view, the standard Neo-Darwinian interpretation of nature dating from R.A. Fisher and his colleagues in the 1930s and before. So we have a picture of selfishness at the genetic level,

which may or may not program altruism at the individual level. John, quite a few people listening might think that this talk of altruism is all very well, but it's a kind of luxury. It's for people in privileged positions. It's when you've got, well, I'm just putting this to you, that when they look around the world, when they listen to the news, when they listen to the Today program, they think that is a very selfish world.

What's going on is selfish all over the place, and there's a little veneer here and there of altruism. So maybe, how does that strike you? Well, I suppose, I mean, it may be that if you look at the news, what gets on the news is the major deviations from altruism. I mean, you're much more likely to get on news by killing somebody than visiting your friend in a hospital. So I think that there's a real bias there. I think actually, my view is that people are mostly nice most of the time. And I don't think it's because we're programmed to be nice because I don't think we're programmed. But I think it's because mostly we have. functional ways of developing people who end up mostly nice. And I think there are, you know, there's lots of, you know, everyday evidence for this. I mean, you know, because the programming that Richard talks about is very specific. I mean, there are specific ways in which contexts in which we're altruistic,

we're altruistic to our kin, were altruistic in certain kinds of situations of predictable reciprocity. But actually, I think we see much more altruism on an example. everyday basis. I mean, you know, I do too. And that's what needs explaining. Well, but I think it's not explained by our being programmed, it explained by our being, you know, our developing in cultures

in education, we're cultural beings, and our cultures are cultures of altruism. Do you want to come in, right? Then I'd like to go about how does it work through then from the gene, the self-deas gene, which is, which is properly explained, I think, and how does that work through? Why does it mutate to

altruism? in people and groups. Well, I mean, I suppose I really want to disagree in a sense with the question. I mean, the idea, again, there's this idea of being programmed. I mean, there's a picture which I think Richard has somewhat, which is, you know, there's a traditional contrast in views of biology between pre-formation and epigenesis. Epigenesis is a view in which reproduction of form comes through a complex process.

We think of stability in terms of objects like concrete buildings, but actually much more stable things are dynamic. Like, you know, the red spot on Mars has been there for as long as we've been looking. It's a whirlpool. It's a... Jupiter, I guess, thank you. And I think that we have to think of ourselves much more like that. And we can change the stability by changing the cultural determinants of how people develop

in ways that we've been sometimes quite successful. Often we're not successful. and cultures vary greatly in how effective they are in bringing out people who conduce to the common good. I don't want to get hung up on the word programmed. It's just as, I think it's just a semantic thing. I want to try to explain why we're so nice because starting out from the assumption

that our ancestors would have been programmed if you like or not if you don't to be nice towards relative and towards reciprocators. How come we're now nice to everybody? And I think that that's not that difficult to explain. Because what natural selection does is to put into brains rules of thumb. It doesn't say look after the interest of your selfish genes in a cognitive way. If it did, then we'd all be a lot nastier than we are.

What natural selection does is put into brains rules of thumb, which might be of the form be nice to any small squawking objects in your nest if you happen to be a bird. Now, in a human case, we used to live in small bands, small villages, where most of the people that you met, perhaps all the people, that you ever met would be relatives and will be people you'd meet again and again and therefore it would be in a position to reciprocate. So the rule of thumb would have been

be nice to everyone you meet. Now that's translated into today where we're cultural beings, where we live in large cities, we're no longer living in small villages or small bands, it's no longer true that everybody you meet is a relative or a potential reciprocator. But the rule of thumb doesn't know that.

Why should it? Just as the rule of thumb be lustful towards members of the opposite sex, works because in nature back then there was no contraception. Now there is contraception, and so the rule of thumb just plain be lustful doesn't work anymore, but it's still there. We still feel the lust. In the same way, we still feel the lust to be nice, because that's what natural selection built into us at a time when being nice meant being nice to everybody you would ever meet. Nowadays we live in big cities, but the rule of thumb is still there.

That's a very, very simplified account, but that's the kind of way in which a Darwinian might argue for why we're as nice as we are. We're certainly much too nice in a naive sense. I would like to come back to you in a second. Miranda, you need to come in. Yes. Let me remain neutral on the question whether a Darwinian story can explain what we're just talking about, why we're so nice.

It seems to me it's worth saying that one might not have to look to Darwinianism for such an explanation. for it might be the cultural social explanation would be satisfying. I mean, one point to make is that altruism is a very, very general idea, certainly to explain many of the specific forms that altruism takes here and now. One has to look to history and culture to explain it. Why do we have one set of virtue concepts than another? The virtue of, I don't know, female chastity isn't particularly current anymore, but it used to be.

Our concepts change, and altruistic acts are couched in rather different terms than they used to be. For that, one couldn't possibly expect to look to Darwin. One has to look to social history, more or less. Now, if one has to look to social history, then, to explain the specific forms of altruism, maybe one can just look to the habits of bringing up children, the social institutions we have,

which instill values and particular virtues in people, for a satisfying explanation for why we're so nice. So I'm simply saying that whether or not there is a Darwinian explanation, it might be that we already have a fairly satisfying explanation at the level of social history and culture. Sorry, Richard. I strongly agree with that. I think they go together.

There's a Darwinian foundation. But then in culture it does change. It changes from decade to decade. There's a constantly shifting zeitgeist, which may have a Darwinian foundation, but it's very, very much, much modified. How's our thinking on genomes changed the argument regarding altruism?

Well, I think it has. I mean, I think we have a quite different view now of the genome. It's become a much more flexist. dynamic object. We tended to think of it as a kind of static repository of information, but actually it's, as we now see it, it's constantly doing things. And also, I suppose more interesting still as we're really moving on from the genome to the epigenome. So that

in a sense, genomes, I said, are flexible, they can do all kinds of things. What determines what they actually do has a lot more to do with somewhat shorter term changes to the structure of the genome that determine which genes are expressed when under what circumstances. So, I mean, when we hear we're 98.4% genetically identical to chimpanzees, we sort of sometimes think we're 98.4% or we're encouraged to think identical to chimpanzees. The reality is what that should show us is that with the same resources, actually the coding part of the genome is over 99% identical to chimpanzees.

But what we're doing with it, how it's configured by these epigenomic changes to it, is quite different. And I think it's also very interesting that to some degree it appears these are heritable. So this is why I made this rather provocative remark about Lamarck. Actually, some of these seem to be partially adaptive and allow us to change the genome, the actual functioning of the genome,

within a lifetime in ways that are partially heritable. Well, alas, we come to an end. There's a loads more questions here, but there you go. I'm very sorry about that. For my sake, actually. But thank you very much, Samiranda Fricker, Richard Dawkinson, John Dupray.

and next week we'll be talking about the speed of light. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.ukuk forward slash radio 4.