Altruism, evolution, and welfare economics

Abstract

Henrich clearly presents the convincing evidence that the evolution of prosocial preferences—altruism and altruistic punishment—is both theoretically possible and empirically present in human populations. Henrich convinces us using only the most restrictive arguments. If one goes beyond the assumptions of one-gene, one-trait, or recognizes the existence of “social cognition” (Caporael, 1997), the case for the existence of prosocial behavior is overwhelming. Furthermore, while Henrich is probably correct in saying that large-scale social cooperation is unique to the human species, mounting evidence suggests that prosocial behavior is also present in such diverse non-human species as lions, meerkats, fire ants, and Arabian babblers (Clutton-Brock, 2002). So why is the reaction against the notion of pure altruism so strong in both economics and biology? A likely reason is that it goes against the dominant cultural belief in progress through competition among individuals. Both evolutionary biology and political economy matured in Victorian England where Darwin’s careful and cautious argument for evolution by natural selection was recast as “survival of the fittest”, a metaphor which fit the dog-eat-dog world of commercial society. Rugged individualism is reflected in the gene-based reductionism of biology as well as the agent-based reductionism of welfare economics (Bergh and van den Gowdy, 2003). In his contribution, Henrich establishes the theoretical basis for cultural group selection based on large-scale cooperation. He shows that the existence of prosocial behavior cannot be explained by individual-based characteristic alone such as kin selection, reciprocal altruism or costly signaling. This does not contradict Darwinian natural selection which can operate on any statistically reliable pattern. Patterns of culture may vary widely in human societies based on the different kinds of cultural transmission including conformist transmission (a short cut to reliable information), prestige-based transmission, punishment of non-conformists, and normative conformity by which people want their behavior to match that of the group. The interplay between these kinds of cultural transmission and the in-