The present edition provides a detailed and accessible discussion ofhis theories and adds an account of the immediate responses to the book on publication.

welcomed by a new generation of students and scholars in all branches of learning.

The 'Evolution of Cooperation' addresses a simple yet age-old question; If living things evolve through competition, how can cooperation ever emerge? Despite the abundant evidence of cooperation all around us, there existed no purely naturalistic answer to this question until 1979, when Robert Axelrod famously ran a computer tournament featuring a standard game-theory exercise called The Prisoner's Dilemma. To everyone's surprise, the program that won the tournament, named Tit for Tat, was not only the simplest but the most "cooperative" entrant. (...) This unexpected victory proved that cooperation - one might even say altruism - is mathematically possible and therefore needs no hidden hand or divine agent to create and sustain it. A great roadblock to the understanding of all sorts of behavior was at last removed. The updated edition includes an extensive new chapter on cooperation in cancer cells and among terrorist organizations. (shrink)

A model is presented to account for the natural selection of what is termed reciprocally altruistic behavior. The model shows how selection can operate -against the cheater (non-reciprocator) in the system. Three instances of altruistic behavior are discussed, the evolution of which the model can explain: (1) behavior involved in cleaning symbioses; (2) warning cries in birds: and (3) human reciprocal altruism. Regarding human reciprocal altruism, it is shown that the details of the psychological system that regulates this altruism can (...) be explained by the model. Specifically, friendship,d islike, moralistic aggression, gratitude, sympathy, trust, suspicion, trustworthiness, aspects of guilt, and some forms of dishonesty and hypocrisy can be explained as important adaptations to regulate the altruistic system. Each individual human is seen as possessing altruistic and cheating tendencies, the expression of which is sensitive to developmental variables that were selected to set the tendencies at a balance appropriate to the local social and ecological environment. (shrink)

Altruism has both an evolutionary and a psychological meaning. As the term is used in evolutionary theory, a trait is deemed altruistic if it reduces the fitness of the actor and enhances the fitness of someone else. In its psychological sense, the thesis that we have altruistic ultimate motives asserts that we care about the welfare of others, not just as a means of enhancing our own well-being, but as an end in itself. In Unto Others (hereafter UO), we consider (...) both evolutionary altruism (Part I) and psychological altruism (Part II) from an evolutionary perspective. We propose a multilevel selection theory to explain how altruism can evolve from group selection, based on Darwin’s solution to the problem. Our presentation of multilevel selection theory expands the range of topics beyond altruism in other respects as well. In Part I1 of UO, we evaluate the arguments, both conceptual and empirical, that philosophers and psychologists have advanced in an attempt to choose between psychological egoism and motivational pluralism. We conclude that these arguments are inconclusive. (shrink)

Here I briefly discuss some comparative data on social play behaviour in hope of broadening the array of species in which researchers attempt to study animal morality. I am specifically concerned with the notion of ‘behaving fairly'. In the term ‘behaving fairly’ I use as a working guide the notion that animals often have social expectations when they engage in various sorts of social encounters the violation of which constitutes being treated unfairly because of a lapse in social etiquette. I (...) will cash this out below in my discussion of social play behaviour. (shrink)

John Greene has dismissed the evolutionary ethics of Simpson as a case in which science was “only a tool, a weapon, in defense of positions that were essentially religious and philosophical.”57 This position adopts an amorphous view of science, in which a scientific theory can be construed to support practically any rhetorical position. The relationship between theory and rhetoric, however, is more complex; it is interactive, with the theory and the rhetoric influencing and supporting one another. It is no coincidence (...) that Allee, Emerson, and Simpson all arrived at a biological basis of democracy and a naturalistic ethics during a period when the future of world politics and man's own morality were in question. Allee's commitment to world peace certainly antedated his theory of sociality, just as Simpson's commitment to democracy undoubtedly preceded his evolutionary views.By adopting a particular theory, however, the biologist necessarily imposes constraints on the corresponding rhetoric. Allee and Emerson could not, for example, have stressed the importance of the individual in democracy, given the orientation and framework of their biological research. There were differences among the social philosophies of Allee, Emerson, and Simpson; these differences depended, in part, on the specific evolutionary metaphors to which they subscribed. Allee's ideas with respect to cooperation were distinct from Emerson's, and both men differed strongly from Simpson on the role of the individual in evolution. The Chicago school was united by a conceptual framework that emphasized the population as the unit of selection, and the importance of cooperation in nature. But cooperation could play many roles: as a unifying principle for a theory of sociality, as an integrating mechanism in physiological functionalism, and as a biological source of hope for a society in the grips of a world war. (shrink)

The first book in English to examine in detail the scientific work of 19th-century Russian evolutionists, and the first in any language to explore the relationship of their theories to their economic, political, and natural milieu.