Is It All Just Selfishness? | Book Review | Survival Strategies

We are selfish. And it is natural. The cruelty and brutality, if exist, are favoured by evolution. Selfishness is what the evolution will always come up with. Find out why.

Is it all just selfishness? After reading Gadakar’s Survival Strategies, I have been reduced to this particular question. Gadakar, through various examples, has beautifully explained the reason behind both cooperation and conflict seen in the living organisms - the majority of which I’ll try to cover here. Alongside that, I’ll try to draw parallels with the things I observe in mankind - their society and politics.

The connotation of the word “infanticide” is very negative for us humans (chapter 6). But no matter how cruel and brutal infanticide is, it is natural. There are several examples of the same seen throughout the tree of life. When the alpha male in the Lions pride takes over a pride, it kills all the infants which are not his own. This behaviour (and in fact all the behaviour) can be explained with two different reasonings - Proximate Reasoning and Ultimate Reasoning (Chapter 1).

Proximate reasons point out the presence of some anti-parental circuit in the Lion's brain, which makes the lion aggressive when it smells the cub. This is the reasoning that a molecular biologist will come up with. On the other hand, the ultimate reason looks at the evolutionary benefit that infanticide must offer. If the behaviour exists in the population, it must be getting selected. And infanticide, no matter how cruel, does get selected. When the alpha male kills all the infants that are not his own, the lioness in the pride will become fertile - thus providing the lion an opportunity to mate and hence leave behind his genes. Hence, if infanticide behaviour is heritable, it will increase in frequency in the population - more than the non-infanticidal trait.

Traits or behaviours, to get selected in the population, must fulfil two requirements - they should be heritable (chapter 3) and they should provide either survival or reproductive advantage. The infanticidal behaviour provides a reproductive advantage. But infanticide is not good for the species. But what’s good for species is not a problem here. This is because the selection, over here, is working at the level of the individual rather than at the level of the group. The selfish lion that commits infanticide will always win in passing down his genes over the non-infanticidal lion. The group selection theory requires the lion to be an altruists. Let's say that all the lions become magically altruists. Even if that happens, due to variation, one of the lions will be slightly more selfish than the rest of the altruists and it will better survive and reproduce. And after a few generations, the population will again become selfish (chapter 3).

But cooperation is not scarce in animals. We do see cooperation. In fact, the cells living inside your body must cooperate with each other. They do have the potential to become selfish and turn cancerous - thus consuming more resources. But, after some point, cancer will end up killing the host, and with the death of the host, the cancer will also die. Hence, the healthy cells will get selected more. Just once in the history of evolution, cancer was able to win over this paradox, by turning into a parasite, which is now common in Tasmanian Wolves - something that I found about in the book “The Cheating Cells”.

If both the interacting animals benefit from each other, they are said to be cooperative. If only one benefits, the other suffers, the benefiting one is called selfish. Altruists are the opposite of selfish - they suffer for the benefit of the other individual. A less prevalent mode of interaction seen in animals is spite (chapter 4).

Selfishness does make sense. But Altruism is a paradox. Still, we have Hymenoptera - the altruistic group among animals. An example is bees. They live in a colony. The colony consists of a single female queen, the male drones, and the sterile female workers. The workers do all the jobs for the colony. Infact, If I approach to destroy a beehive, the worker will sting me to protect the hive but at the same time will lose its own life - stinging generally makes bees lose their digestive glands. Not just that, bees are also sterile - hence choosing not to pass their genes. A supreme act of altruism?

No. Not a supreme act of altruism. Instead, it is selfishness at the level of the gene. There can be two explanations - Hamilton’s explanation (mentioned in Survival Strategies) and Szathmary’s explanation (mentioned in Principles of Life). Hamilton proposed Hamilton’s rule and the concept of Inclusive Fitness. He used a term called ‘Genetic Relatedness’. Your genetic relatedness with your brother is simply the probability that you carry the same gene that he does. Generally, you are related to your brother by a genetic relatedness of 0.5 and to yourself by a genetic relatedness of 1. Hence, if your brother is drowning, you won’t jump to save him since you'll only be saving 50% of the genes that you are carrying. But, if three of your brothers are drowning, you will jump since the combined fitness of all three brother will be 0.5 x 3 = 1.5

Since bees are a haplodiploid individual, they are related to their colony sister by a genetic relatedness of 0.75 but to their offspring by just 0.5. Hence, by choosing sterility and protecting the colony, they are securing a better chance of transmitting their genes, indirectly, through the queen. If we look at Szathmary's explanation, he considers the entire colony as a superorganism (based on Ganti’s definition of life and living organisms). Hence, worker altruism in bees is the same as the slavery of individual cells in a multicellular organism (Chapter 5,6) (Note that Szathmary did’t actually attempt to explain this behaviour. The explanation that I provide here is my own inference from his concepts of superorganisms and Ganti’s definition of life).

Another reason behind altruism is reciprocity - something which the altruist bats excerpts from the fellow bats when they vomit the hard earned blood meal for those who are hungry. This is again explainable. If Bat A suffers a mild cost by donating food to Bat B, later, when Bat A is hungry, it can again beg for food from Bat B (Chapter 6).

Both reciprocity and nepotism (favouring the genetically related) require the ability of kin recognition. Kin recognition has been proven in many animals. Now, since all the altruism of an animal is to just favour their genetically related kin or an investment for a return in future (reciprocity) - all the altruism is selfishness at the level of genes (Chapters 6, 7).

Studies done by Axelrod on Game Theory or Prisoners Dilemma suggest that among different strategies used to interact within a social group, the best strategy is the one that finely balances cooperation and conflict. Even the most cooperative hymenopterans exhibit fierce conflicts within themselves (chapter 8,9).

But the most fascinating thing that Gadakar only touched upon is the question, “Are animals conscious?”. Certain studies do suggest evidence of consciousness in animals. For example, P300 - an EPR (Event-Related Potential, a neuronal activity) - which is usually associated with the thought process in humans is also observed in other animals. But the question of the consciousness in animals does not matter as the theory still works (just like the fact that the proximate explanation is not required to pursue the ultimate explanation and vice-versa).

An answer that I was looking for in the book but could not find, was how the extreme consciousness and self-consciousness in humans interfere with our own genetic instincts. We would have been utterly cruel and brutal (which we are, read news from Gaza, Ukraine) without a second thought. But we do question our own selfish acts - something which the lion does not. Our consciousness seems to be in conflict with our own genetic instincts. Something that remained unexplored in Gadakar’s Survival Strategies.

References And Further Readings:

1. Survival Strategies by R. Gadakar

2. Principles of Life by T. Ganti

3. The Cheating Cells by A. Akitipis