It’s nice to see Richard Dawkins back to arguing about science, rather than religion. In this week’s New Scientist he picks a fight with fellow biologist Edward Wilson over the origins of altruism.
Dawkins is a supporter of kin selection – which holds that helping your relations spreads the genes that you share with them and therefore this explains why we see altruism such as worker ants forgoing reproduction for the good of their kin.
New Scientist reports that a new paper from Wilson in BioScience rejects kin selection as the explanation of insect altruism, “in a move that has baffled evolutionary biologists worldwide” (subscription required). He thinks eusociality – where there is a queen supported by non-reproducing workers – appears after insects are forced to be flexible in their behaviour and then continues to evolve through ‘group selection’ because cooperating animals do better than animals that don’t cooperate.
New Scientist gives the example of solitary wasps who can become either queen or workers when forced to next together. If the dispersal of offspring is then blocked for some reason then bingo: eusociality. If this new colony is better than solitary competitors it will continue to prosper.
Rubbish, says Dawkins:
“What matters is gene selection. All we need ask of a purportedly adaptive trait is, ‘What makes a gene for that trait increase in frequency?’ Wilson wrongly implies that explanations should resort to kin selection only when ‘direct’ selection fails. Here he falls for the first of my ‘12 misunderstandings of kin selection’; that is, he thinks it is a special, complex kind of natural selection, which it is not.”
In the true sense of kin selection, offspring are ‘kin’ just as siblings are. Parental care and sibling care both evolve because copies of genes for caring are present in beneficiaries. Genes promoting feeding of larvae by sterile workers are passed on by those larvae – sisters, nephews, and so on – destined to become reproductives. That’s kin selection, and it maintains sterile worker castes in insect colonies. Wilson could not dispute that.
Those without NS subscriptions can get the gist of this from pick up in the Independent and Telegraph newspapers.
And those thinking that Dawkins is always dogmatic should bear in mind that he does change his mind – at least he does on matters of evolutionary science.