In the general sphere, there is an apparent contagious fear - one that borders on the bizarre - that proven theories of nature find their way into the nation-states of mankind. This red line is heavily guarded, the stakes are high if an encroachment is observed. On this side of the wall… culture, morality, society; on the other… beasts, savagery, war! You will see individuals and institutions alike fight tooth-and-nail to see that they have their cake and eat it, that the laws of nature are kept to mere platitudes, and above all else - that mankind be applied to none of it. Of course, we’ve already been “applied” long ago, and will remain as such. This poker game is being played with fake chips.

One specific concept in biology where you’ll see this game played out with great intensity is that of altruism. More cultural forces would have us believe that altruism, or rather, “acts of kindness”, are simply that: we, perhaps even other animals, are compelled to act altruistically because we are good beings. Utilitarian ones at that, ones that act to alleviate the most suffering out of existence as possible. We may even act this way because we are imbued with a certain “spirit” or “likeness” to some concept or another.

The truth is that altruism should be an evolutionary impossibility.

It should not exist anywhere in nature, if that’s what altruism actually is. Any organism that would willingly hand over its resources for free will nosedive its reproductive fitness, it will commit evolutionary suicide. And given enough time, it will cease to exist as a behavior along with any organism that expressed such a behavior.

“No instinct has been produced for the exclusive good of other animals, but each animal takes advantage of the instincts of others.”

(Darwin, Origin of Species, Ch. 7)

Altruistic Acts in Nature

Yet, altruism clearly exists in nature. In a number of species, including wolves, chimpanzees, and apostle birds, reproductive adults willingly “give up” on having offspring of their own and instead assist in raising another’s. Vampire bats will donate food (regurgitated blood) to others who, for any number of reasons, are unable to leave their colony’s nest. Meerkats stand guard at an elevated and vulnerable position to serve as an early-warning to others that predators are nearby. Then there are eusocial insects, such as honey bees, who will suicidally sting threats to protect the hive at large.

We’re missing something. We are observing animals willingly set their own reproductive fitness to zero by terminating their right to their own children, and yet the behavior itself exists as a reproductive strategy.

Evolving Altruism - Accounting for Kinship

The resolution to this is relatively simple - related organisms quite literally share identical genetic material. And the closer the relationship, the more genes are found in common. For instance, you inherited one half of your genes from your father, and the other half from your mother. Therefore you inherited a quarter of your genes from your grandmother, and so on. This is known as Sewall Wright’s “coefficient of relationship”, denoted r.

In real-world examples where individuals often share ancestors in multiple lines, the math can quickly become complicated, as shown here. The relationship between direct ancestors and descendants can be simplified to

Whereas, r is the coefficient of relationship between individual A and individual B, and n is the number of generations or degrees of relationship between the individuals. The sum implies that there may be multiple paths to reach the relationship (i.e., in the case of inbreeding) and that these must be calculated individually and added. Let’s use you, A, and your grandfather, B, as a simple demonstration.

Because there are two generations (or “instances of reproduction”) between you and your grandfather, the coefficient is determined as

And since this is a case of direct descent with no inbreeding, we can simplify that to simply (1/2)^2, or 0.25.

What this means, in relation to altruism, is that any beneficial act towards your grandfather is in effect a beneficial act to “25%” of yourself! This increases the reproductive fitness of the organism, who has no offspring of his own, to something above zero. Thereby, the strategy can evolve. This phenomenon is known as inclusive fitness - the passing of shared genes from one generation to the next through an individual’s efforts to offspring that are not directly his own.

WD Hamilton - Kin Selection

In contribution to the genetic revolution of the 1960’s and 70s, W.D. Hamilton devised the mathematical basis for a plausible evolutionary mechanism of altruism, coined as kin selection. Recall that what we are looking for here is something that brings the reproductive fitness of an individual high enough to warrant the altruistic act itself, or show that somehow, an act which appears (or is) suicidal for an organism actually propels the existence of its genes into the future.

Let’s start with inclusive fitness, and define the terms. Inclusive fitness should simply be the individual’s reproductive fitness plus the fitness of related individuals:

Where the inclusive fitness w, of individual i, is found by the individual fitness (number of offspring produced) of that individual, a, plus the contribution of its relatives, x.

Now, let’s write out exactly how to define “the contribution of relatives”, x:

Where r is the previously mentioned coefficient of relationship between individual i and j, and b is the reproductive fitness of individual j. Since r can never be greater than 1, we are expecting to see high levels of benefit to individual j, and/or high levels of relationship between b and j, to see altruistic acts happen. This is especially true if the altruistic act incurs a heavy cost to the individual’s fitness a sub i, such as in the case of sterile pack members, where that number is always zero.

If we reformulate the equation into a cost and benefit ratio which brings inclusive fitness at or above 1, where the shared genes will either persist or spread, we come to the following equation:

Which simplifies to a very easy to work with,

Where the benefit times the coefficient of relationship minus the cost of the altruistic act is greater to zero. If this is satisfied, then the altruistic act will occur with an inclusive benefit to the individual.

Consider this example: a pair of brothers (r = 0.5) where one brother gives up on having offspring of his own to help raise the offspring of his brothers. The cost is total, or 1. For us to get over 0, the act must have more than doubled the reproductive fitness of the reproducing brother: 0.5B - 1 > 0.

This also neatly explains the complex social structure and cooperation in eusocial insects, due to haplodiploidy. Since male bees are haploid and queen bees are diploid, female worker bees possess all of her father’s genes and half of her mother’s. This puts the coefficient of relationship to 0.75, allowing for the complex social relationships and “hivemind” behavior we see.

The important contribution of Hamilton’s equations is the idea that for altruistic acts to occur, barring some form of direct reciprocity, the act must involve a recipient and donor who bear some form of a significant blood relationship. The closer the relationship, the greater sacrifice an altruistic act can have. Distant relationships allow only for weak altruism with little to no cost to the donor.

Altruism to an individual where no reciprocity is expected… suicidal! Altruism of great cost to an individual which bears little to no relation to you.. suicidal! It appears everything in existence has this simple observation sorted out, except contemporary man, who has deluded himself into believing otherwise.

Tribalism makes evolutionary sense. In fact, it’s the only type of societal organization that’s mathematically possible to exist in perpetuity.

When looking at the scale of nations and race, it is clear how the high-trust societies we (formerly) have known came to be. The coefficient of relationship between an individual and another random individual of the same race is somewhere between 0.18 and 0.26, which lands it approximately between a value of a grandfather or first cousin to any specific individual. We therefore expect a nation or race to operate as a loosely-related family.

We also expect that, when the intranational blood relationship of a people decreases, so too will the likelihood of great sacrifice of individuals to the tribe. And this is exactly what we do observe. A number of studies confirm that greater ethnic diversity in a population results in lower levels of trust between individuals, decreases neighborly exchange and charity, increases incidence of violence, and declines in social cohesion.

This article puts it rather bluntly:

"Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings."

Similar implications can be found within more literal families with the introduction of interracial marriage and reproduction.

A key feature of the right is the self-alignment with natural principles. It is important to know exactly what these are, the historical scientific basis of them, and in the case of this article - attach theory to mathematic terms.

We see that the act of altruism itself is an evolutionary strategy, and more importantly one that must confer some ultimate benefit to the donor’s genes. Anything short of this is suicide, and cannot exist in perpetuity.

Quite simply, altruism for the sake of itself is slated for death. It is tribalism, the cooperation between blood-related individuals, which provides the only mathematically possible route for altruism to occur in the ways we are accustomed to.

Further Reading

Twelve Misunderstandings of Kin Selection, Richard Dawkins

Kin Selection and Its Critics, J. Birch & S. Okasha, 2014

Part I of Hamilton’s 1964 Paper on Kin Selection