A REVIEW OF A REVIEW:
Molly has recently read 'One Good Deed' (Nature: vol 444/7, December 7, 2006), a review of the book 'The Altruism Equation:Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness'. The book, of course, is another item in the continuing exposition of the rise of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, fields that were called into being by the necessity to explain "altruism" in a Darwinian fashion. I haven't read the book, but I can immediately detect some matters of "unfairness" in the review by Oliver Curry, apparently a philosopher rather than a practicing scientist. The first is a confusion in regards to the "level of selection". Curry assumes that the proposition that "genes" are the unit of selection is a fundamental paradigm shift that somehow demands that explanations be directed in a totally different manner. In actual fact the "unit of selection" is irrelevant for the explanation of altruism. The mathematics remain the same whether the unit be the gene, the organism, the group, the species or the clade. See 'The Structure of Evolutionary Theory' by the late Stephan J. Gould for a further exposition of this matter, even though I disagree with Gould in that I believe that the individual organism is the primary object of selection.
The author of the review in Nature gives little indication of what exactly the authors of the compilation said. He whines and complains that "kin selection", the most obvious manner in which altruism evolved, and the source of a majority of empirical research to this day, is given an excessive play. Well...it is also the most successful in terms of predictions verified in the real world. Put that in your pipe! He also devotes an excess of complaining to the level of "biographical detail" of the Kropotkin versus Huxley debates and -strangely enough given his first complaint- that W.C. Allee's theories of altruism as divorced from kinship is given excessive play. Had the author of the review been a little more knowledgeable he would have realized that the Russian Darwinists, of whom Kropotkin was one, had posed this question long before Allee did.
It seems to Molly like a bad review of a good book, and I hope to read in in the future.
Molly