Charles Darwin 25individual contests. Of course, the struggle for existence may take place between
an individual and nature, rather than between two individuals, but the end result
is that one individual is going to do better against nature than another individual.
What you are not going to get therefore is one individual helping another individ-
ual just for the sake of niceness. Natural selection will put an end to that pretty
sharply, because the selfish individual will take advantage of the nice individual
and hence do better in life’s struggles.
There are some obvious counter examples and Darwin wrestled with these. Most
obviously there are the social insects, a major topic of discussion in the section on
instinct in theOrigin. Why do you get sterile workers giving their all for the nest?
Darwin could see how features possessed by the sterile workers could be passed on.
Steers have features much prized by breeders, who go back to the family stock to
repeat them. But what is the benefit for the workers? Eventually, in theOrigin,
Darwin decided to treat the whole nest as a unit, as an individual, and hence
argued that selection could modify parts – just as an ordinary individual has parts
(heart, lungs, etc) that can be selected for and against.
But he went on worrying about this issue, and in the 1860s he and Wallace
discussed the issue at length. Wallace was always a committed socialist and for
him a group perspective was not only scientifically sound but psychologically com-
pelling. (Did Darwin, the grandchild of a major industrialist, feel the same way
about individual selection? Possibly.) The two mean differed particularly over
sterility. Is the mule sterile because it is good neither as horse or donkey, and this
benefits the parent species? Or is the mule sterile by chance? In which case, any
benefit for the parent species is quite incidental. Darwin thought chance, because
otherwise the mule would be laying down its reproductive life for others, whereas
Wallace thought in group terms and the benefit of the parent species. The two
men had to agree to disagree. (Wallace, incidentally, other than for humans where
he had some very odd ideas about what makes a young man attractive in the
eyes of a young woman, was never that enthused about sexual selection by female
choice. Given that sexual selection is strongly tilted towards individual selection,
this fits the pattern.)
When it came to human morality, however, Darwin rather buckled at the knees.
Perhaps here uniquely we have a case where a form of group selection takes over.
A tribe where individuals help each other would outcompete a tribe where indi-
viduals are selfish. Generosity helps the group even if the individual suffers. But
Darwin was not enthusiastic about this move. And after all, tribes were usually
kin structures, so we have a kind of family situation as in the social insects. More-
over, in an anticipation of what today’s evolutionists call “reciprocal altruism,”
Darwin also suggested that morality may be a function of “you scratch my back
and I will scratch yours.”
But it may be asked, how within the limits of the same tribe did a
large number of members first become endowed with these social and
moral qualities, and how was the standard of excellence raised?...