On the current state of altruism: generosity in the eyes of natural selection from Darwin to today

Abstract

The conference organized by the Lincei for the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth offers the opportunity to investigate one of the key questions of evolutionism today: can genuine evolution keep itself stable in a population subject to natural selection? Four cycles of unpublished lessons edited by William Donald Hamilton during the period between 1965 and 1975 and recently found by Coco (Les lecons inedites de W. D. Hamilton, Du probleme de l’altruisme a l’application des modeles mathematiques. Memoire de DEA en “Histoire et Civilisation”. Paris, 2003) at the British Library, London, offer the possibility to trace a framework of the theoretical positions of the founder of inclusive fitness and contest some interpretations of his thought that have been put forward in recent times by Sober and Wilson (Unto others: the evolution and psychology of unselfish behavior. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998b). An in-depth article regarding these matters is currently being written and will be published in this journal. In this study, I have proposed a critical framework of the problem of altruism from J. S. B. Haldane to our days, using Hamilton’s unedited writings, edited literature and a certain heuristic use of Shakespearean characters, paradigmatic interpretations of the human condition, as already partially proposed in a book that came out this year in Italian (Coco in Egoisti, malvagi e generosi Storia naturale dell’altruismo. Bruno Mondadori, Milano, 2008).