OTHERNESS: WHEN KILLING IS EASY:
The above is the title of a recent review in Science magazine (Science 315, pp601-602, February 2, 2007) by reviewer Caroline Ash. This a review of two books. One of them 'The Altruism Equation:Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness', was the subject of the review that Molly discussed back on Feb. 11th under the heading 'A Review of a Review'. The other is the book 'Conflict', edited by Martin Jones and A.C. Fabien. Both of these books are collections of previous writings, but the approach couldn't be any more different. The first book features writers puzzling over the evolution of altruism while the second discusses the equally strong biological tendencies that lead to intraspecific conflict. The two together make an interesting study in contrast.





Caroline Ash is much more enthusiastic about 'The Altruism Equation' than the reviewer for Nature was. She finds it "exhilarating", and her "irritation" is reserved for the author Dugatkin's "unfairly bemoaning the lack of insight into economic modelling by all of Hamilton's predecessors, including Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley and Walter Clyde Allee."





The lack of mathematical base or simple mistakes are also bemoaned in the likes of Ronald Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane and Sewell Wright. The reviewer could easily have included Kropotkin amongst this number as he is discussed extensively in 'The Altruism Equation'. Kropotkin was no mathematical illiterate; he trained in the artillery after all, and his criticisms of Marx's theories of value show that he understood at least a complex situation to be so...quite unlike Marx did. I will, however, defer to the reviewer's irritation here. I've read about where Haldane expressed the "bare bones" of the theory of kin selection, but I am not well read enough to tell anybody where he went wrong. From a simple historical perspective, however, the theories of altruism could simply not be expressed at the time of Kropotkin, Huxley and the others because the mathematical tools of game theory were as yet unknown.





Molly has yet to acquire a copy of 'The Altruism Equation', but this review definitely whets my appetite more. Ash brings up the question of George Price, one of the most fascinating characters in the development of evolutionary psychology. Price turned Hamilton's theories of the evolution of kin selection on their head and laid out a theoretical explanation for "the evolution of spite" whereby a spiteful act could still be selected for if the cost to the actor was less than the damage done to a rival.





Price is one of the more interesting characters I have ever heard of. Born in 1922, he was originally a physical chemist, later a science journalist and a computer consultant. He came to population genetics and evolutionary biology late in life when he devised the Price Equation after having read Hamilton's 1964 paper on kin selection. This is a covariance equation (1)that explained the frequency of allele variation in a population where the frequency of one allele depends on the frequency of another. This had previously been derived by C.C. Li, but price's formulation allowed it to be applied to all levels of selection, including inclusive fitness and group selection.





On June 6th, 1970 Price underwent a "conversion experience" and turned from atheism to a devote Christianity. He devoted the rest of his life to helping the homeless, taking to sleeping in his office at the Galton Laboratory so that homeless people could sleep in his rented house. This house was eventually demolished as part of a construction project. Having given away all his possessions Price went on to live at various squats in north London until he eventually committed suicide at Christmas, 1974 with a pair of "nail scissors".





This character definitely deserves a further look, and Molly will do same in the future.





Caroline Ash uses Price's work on the evolution of "spite" to lead into the second part of her review on the book 'Conflict'. This is part of the Darwin College lectures, Cambridge, a series held each year. This is apparently from the 1995 series on conflict that covers a wide spectrum of topics, from Labour and Conflict, to sex differences in intergroup conflict, to the Middle East and the evolution of state sponsored war...along with much more. The reviewer obviously can't do justice to such a wide range of topics in a few paragraphs and so she concentrates on two essays in the volume, one on parallels between aggression in humans, the regular chimpanzee (Pan trogodytes), and the bonobos (Pan paniscus), and the possible ecological pressures that led to different rates of inter-group aggression in these different species, the second on sex differences in intergroup aggression in humans. This hardly does justice to the volume on the lectures, but little more can be expected from a two page review devoted to two books.





Molly is not surprised at how two different reviewers can have such different views of a book like 'The Altruism Equation'. Each focuses on things that the other ignores because each brings their previous tastes to the reading. This doesn't mean, ala a pseudo intellectual post modernist "explanation", that they "create the meaning by manipulating the text". It merely means that they notice and emphasize different things that actually exist in the books reviewed.
Molly