TEDxTalpiot - Oren Harman - The Evolution of Altruism

Lucy says I'm intrigued by this view you have on the purpose of life Charlie Brown you say we're put here on earth to make others happy Charlie Brown replies that's right because he says what are the others put here for well that's a very good question what I want to talk about today is where kindness comes from and more specifically where altruism comes from and this is really a question that mankind has been contemplating since the beginning of time different religious traditions have offered the notion of a God creating man in his own image that's where kindness comes from secular traditions have spoken about the use of reason to reach the good in the right in general the fault lines have been are we talking about some kind of inheritance whether whether divine or or natural or is this a construction and for the first time in the nineteenth century this man Charles Darwin made it a scientific problem because when he was writing on the Origin of Species he perceived immediately that here was a paradox what is the paradox how does one explain the persistence of traits that reduce Fitness if evolution is a story of survival of the fittest it seems not to make sense and in fact Darwin drove every complex structure an instinct should be useful to the possessor natural selection could never produce in and being anything injurious to itself for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each and yet natural selection had produced an enormous amount about those I'd like to give you a number of examples from the natural world so these are honeypot ants from the American deserts and their sole job in life is to hang upside down backwards like great big pots of sugared water and wait until they're attacked by the Queen or it's rude whenever they're thirsty in other words these are life long wet nurses that's all they do in life these are termites our entire case of termites forgo reproduction altogether they do not reproduce their fitness equals 0 no children no project this is a very very well known case of the honeybee the stinging bee when the bee stings the sting is launched inside the skin and it really eviscerates the the stomach of the of the of the honeybee the honeybee has sacrificed itself words brothers and sisters but altruistic behavior isn't limited to to the suit what are called the social insects or the hinata this is one of my favorite favorite examples this is a social amoeba called this cotillion Discordian now the amoeba usually is single-celled autonomous individual single-celled organism burrows in the ground and does very well there except when when times are tough it emits a chemical signal of cyclic a and P and all the rest of the amoeba in the area do the same and they begin to converge on this gradient of the chemical signal and when they come together they create a slug now this slug is now an individual autonomous organism and each one of the formerly autonomous amoeba have now forgot given up their individuality and they are now selves in the body of this one single being now the single being has sensors it has sensors for light and for air and it sort of walks around the forest and when it finds light in air then something unbelievable happens the top 20% of the slug the head of the slug create out of their bodies a kind of stalk which allows the bottom 80% to shimmy up the stalk and to create a kind of orbit look you see it looks like a lollipop now these are spores and now they have a good chance of being carried away by a felicitous wind wind or on the wings of an unsuspecting insect so what's happened is the top 20% have sacrificed themselves for the bottom 80% other examples include plants this is a yellow jewelweed which under conditions of light deprivation doesn't do what you would expect it to do if it was an egoist quote-unquote in other words it doesn't allocate energy to the creation of leaves in order to soak up as much Sun as it but rather puts its energies into into other other things into stems and so forth and so doesn't and in order in order to help its brothers and sisters who are around it altruistic behavior in gazelles very well-known behavior you have particular Centuri gazelles who when they when they locate a predator lurking in the grass engage in something called studying behavior which is basically they jump up and down very hot six feet ostensibly drawing all the fire of the lion and allowing the rest of the troop to to escape this is the mammalian equivalent of the of the termite it's called the blind African mole rat a very good looking organism and it's chitin and its behavior is exactly equal to the behavior of termites in other words entire entire cases of individuals forego reproduction altogether so that this good-looker the Queen can produce all the project baboons but Boone's spent an enormous enormous amount of time cleaning each other grooming behavior now time is a proxy for fitness because they could have been doing other things with their time it would have helped their fitness and so this is also considered altruistic behavior by the way if anyone in the audience has children who need to be cleaned but wounds are very good very good cleaners throughout the 20th century science has provided a number of answers to the question where is alpha live home how could an altruism evolved if in fact this is some kind of paradox and I'm going to go over them very briefly the three that I'm going to talk about which are the main ones are nepotism reciprocation and group selection so the first one is nepotism you can read the the cartoon the guy who formalized it mathematically was a man by the name of bill Hammond Hamilton and this is basic basically the notion that altruism can evolve if it happens between kin between members of the same family now this is based on the point of view the point of view of the gene in other words the gene doesn't care in what body it advances into the next generation as long as the same gene advances into the next generation so basically this is not this is an idea which was proved in a way from another genius and this is this is apocryphal but I'll tell it because it's a nice story anyway this guy JBS Haldane who apparently over his 17th beer in a pub in London sort of blurted out I'll give my life for two brothers and eight presidents this is the logic of the genes I point of view and this is the notion that that altruism can come if it happens between between Kenny the next idea is the idea of reciprocation advanced most famously by men by the name of Bob Traverse and this is basically the notion simple notion of you scratch my back I'll scratch yours so you can already sort of imagine that into this kind of dynamic you can have tools like game theory doing a lot of work the final idea is this idea group selection group selection is to say that if two groups are competing which group will be more successful the outpost ik group or a group with many outputs or group with as opposed to a group with less outdoors with more egos what do you think the outputs the outputs are all they're all cooperating with one another and so they'll be they'll be they'll be more successful than a group where people are out for themselves or organisms are out for themselves however within the group what does it made to be it pays to be an egoist because the ego which doesn't doesn't pay any kind of tax and so you see with the evolution of altruism it's a kind of trait where there's a inherent conflict between the interest of the individual and the interests of the group and the idea of group selection is to say that sometimes natural selection can work at the level of the level of the brew rather than at the level of the individual now everything that I've been telling you about until now has to do with biological output and biological altruism is something very different than psychological option I'll explain what I mean biological altruism is defined by the result of a behavior so if you've acted in such a way so is to confer a fitness benefit on someone else on another organism while incurring some kind of fitness cost then you are by definition an outpost which is why we can have output stick ameba now this is something very different from psychological a prism the kind of algorithm that we talk about when we talk about outdoors in between human beings I think the unlucky bunny illustrates this very well the unlucky bunny helps the old lady across the street now even if the unlucky bunny is killed by a truck while doing so if the old lady knows that the intention of the unlucky bunny was to be written into the will of the old lady and that's why he did it that's why he was time then she and everyone else will rightly not consider him an altruist in other words psychological altruism is all about intention biological altruism doesn't even subsume mine that's why amoeba can be Alturas in the biological sense but of course the mind the organ which allows for intention to begin with is like any other part of our biological being something which has been subject to the ruthless spell of natural selection it's not apart from the body so the real question and the question that we're all interested in many scientists for many years have been interested in what is the connection is there a connection and what is the connection how can we define it between biological altruism on the one hand and psychological altruism on the other I want to tell you briefly about this man George Price who in a way teaches us a very important lesson about our attempts to understand psychological outcomes Malthe rosamund human beings based on our understanding of altruism in nature George Price was a very unusual individual kind of a kind of mix between a Forrest Gump character and a Rain Man character incredibly brilliant very very strange socially probably I mean we're all somewhere on a spectrum but he was probably closer on the Altan on the autism spectrum to to one side and most a man whom was born in in New York in 1922 a man whose interviewers at Harvard University when he arrived as a 17 year old boy said of him may go haywire but will never be hungry which is to say he might go crazy but he'll never be boring and that was really spot on true about this guy like Forrest Gump he found himself at the center of different scientific and technological revolutions in 20th century working as a chemist in the in the Manhattan Project then it'd make making very important inventions on transistor research with people like Shockley and Bardeen at Bell Labs leaving that becoming a oncologist leaving that becoming a writer then inventing computer aided design for IBM but not but not taking out a patent joining IBM as a low rung worker and then obviously with computer-aided design IBM made a lot of money off of his invention what happened to this man was at some time in the 60s he underwent a crisis and he decided that life really wasn't worth living anymore and so he left his family left his job against the good wishes of all his best friends left his country and decided to move to England to try to his hand it to crack one last great mystery and that was the mystery of where does altruism and where does kindness and altruism come from and he moved to England and within a very very short period of time he wrote a very short paper which he was able to somehow publish in nature no one knew who he was he wasn't part of any kind of community he had never trained in biology had no formal training and evolutionary biology and he wrote an equation he probably you can't read this but there are no references here absolutely no references so it was completely sua generous came out of nowhere and he walked off the street literally into the what was then one of the best genetics department in the world at University College London and showed it to a professor who had no idea who he was and said is this is this new and within about five minutes had an honorary professorship and keys to his own office and then went home and I won't go through the whole story because we're short on time but when he began thinking about this equation philosophically his his very unusual mind concluded that the meaning of the equation is that altruism is always self-interest in disguise whether it's helping it the gene or the individual or the group altruism is always some is always a kind of self-interest in other words the best that the natural process can do is a kind of second-hand goodness not a pure pure kindness and this was a terrible realization to him because by this time he had become an evangelical Christian like I said a very unusual guy and he decided that he wasn't gonna he didn't agree to take this on board he was going to try to fight it in other words he was going to try to fight his own miraculous equation which came out of nowhere and so he began a program of radical altruism in his own life to try to show that the human spirit could do what the natural process the natural process could not do namely to bring about true pure genuine selflessness and so he went out to the streets of London again this guy came out of nowhere he had no friends no one knew who he was and he began helping helpless homeless people homeless people drunks people living sort of down and out in the streets it began by you know saying hello my name is George Sears appears a pound here's a sandwich it graduated to him inviting many many homeless people into his home and in the end this is George in the fall of 1974 in London already down to skin and bones he had nothing he was very glad for it because what it shot what it meant to him was that indeed the spirit could transcend what nature could produce finally though the story is not a very happy one he could not explain to himself whether his own motivations of selflessness were not really self-interested and this inability finished him off he ended his life tragically in a squat in Kentish Town in London in the winter of 1975 this is a photo that I took of his grave in in 2008 now this isn't his grave his grave is here in the brush so he died completely anonymous no tombstone until this very day now the reason I bring the example of george price is because his story shows and in fact when you look at the history of attempts to solve the problem of altruism when it comes to human beings to try to under try to use what we know from nature in order to understand our own deep motivations it's clear that we often this is just the case it's a fact we often fall into two very very sort of deep biases of fallacies one of them is the naturalistic fallacy which is basically to the naturalistic fallacy which was explained by David Hume already in the eighteenth centuries to confuse that which is with that with that ought to be which ought to be so a kind of category confusion the second one is originalism which is basically to say if I've understood the origin of something then I've understood that something and the fact of the matter is that scientists trying to work on the origin of altruism throughout ever since Darwin and including until this day often fall into these two fallacies now we have actually someone in the audience who is responsible for this paper up here and I'd like you to train your your train your your eyes on this today the reason why this is important because George Price died in 1975 but the the sort of the search for the origins of kindness continually continued in full force and science uses a battery of different tools to try to locate kindness one of the tools that we use today is genetics and in a study that was actually conducted in this university you take a bunch of students and you give them a hundred shekels or something like that and you say okay you have a one-off non iterated meeting with a stranger and you can do whatever you want with this 100 you can give them the whole 100 give them 70 give them 50 give them 20 give nothing at all and then you tabulate the results of the behavior and then you take a swab from these these people's mouths and you genotype them you look for certain genetic markers that might be in correlation genetic markers that we know that play some kind of role in what is called say pro-social behavior in rats okay these are genetic markers in this in this particular case that have to do with a molecule called as a president or oxytocin and remember each one oxytocin another another picture that I want you to look at this I took at Stanford some time ago at a place called the Center for compassion and altruism research at Stanford University a lot of money going into this there they try to actually locate the place in the brain which is responsible for for altruism with the help of tools like fMRI now this is this is the photo of a brain of a Tibetan monk because we all know that Tibetan monks are all that all that more altruistic than the rest of us now the reason I mentioned these things because these types of these are very interesting results right but they're also incredibly reductive and they make it very easy to fall into one of the biases either of the naturalistic bias see or the bottle to buy and the bias of originalism and I'm going to end with this I mean when we think about altruism in humans the real problem that we grapple with individually and which obviously George Price himself graphical is a problem that that Aristotle himself pointed his finger at many years ago and that is that the love we feel for other stems from the love we feel for ourselves how can you know when you do when you perform some kind of act of kindness towards a fellow human being whether you're doing it because you really want to help that human being or because you get something out of it there's some kind of disguised self-interest it doesn't have to be disguised and it doesn't have to be conscious by the way it could be some visceral feeling some some bodily reaction well that's a very good question and I want to end with the thought that in trying to think about that question we might not have a better guy than this man behind me who was a tortured soul himself Wittgenstein who said that even after we've answered all the possible scientific questions that we can posit we still will have not scratched the true problems of humanity and at this point there will be no more questions left and that is precisely the answer so I think that the altruism is a kind of problem that lives very much at the nexus between science and society between biology and evolution and and culture and at these type of very sort of sensitive and important next nexuses we have to remember the very sage words of Wittgenstein when George Price killed himself bill Hamilton was the guy who I told you before was the man responsible for formalizing the idea of kin selection he loved him very much he was one of the only people in the world who understood what a genius this man was and how important his equation explaining the origins of kindness was and he fought his way into the squat after George died he actually fought his way to the squat and in the in the there was a sort of bloodied linoleum floor where the body had been found he found a little scrap of paper it was written in George Prices handwriting and this is what it said men and women have always yearned for understanding compassion forgiveness and deeds of loving kindness from their fellow men but often they've been sadly disappointed and today more than ever in a world torn by strife and dissension the crying need is for a real demonstration of love you see love would pour the oil of quietness upon the troubled waters of human relationships heal the ugly wounds of strife and contention and bring together those separated by hatred jealousy and selfishness I think that the case of George Price who really is responsible for a formalization which is our best crack until this very day at the dynamics of natural selection and within that within that dynamic of the evolution of a trait like altruism I think it's clear that the kind of love that he's talking about here is something that cannot be fit on a mathematical equation and that's something that we should be there all be very very happy about thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 20,768

Rating: 4.7791409 out of 5

Keywords: Harman, ג'ורג', ted x, טד, Altruism, פרייס, היסטוריה, tedx talks, Evolution, tedx talk, אורן, ted, tedx, TEDx, אלטרואיזם, הרמן, Jerusalem, George, ted talks, אבולוציה, Oren, ted talk, ביולוגיה, Price, Kindness, TEDxTalpiot

Id: db7li_TMJ0M

Length: 22min 31sec (1351 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 12 2010