Category: books

The scale of human cooperation If you start with the assumption that biological altruism evolves because the benefits fall on genetic relatives, the scale of human social organization is puzzling. We cooperate with huge numbers of individuals who are not genetic kin—large-scale modern societies depend on it. Not all of …

The ‘cell state’ metaphor In the 19th century, biologists came to appreciate for the first time the fundamentality of the cell to all life on Earth. One of the early pioneers of cell biology, Rudolf Virchow, realized that the discovery of the cell brought with it a new way of …

In Part 1, we saw that cooperative behaviour is rife in the world of microorganisms. The fruiting bodies of myxobacteria and social amoebas are famous, but any bacterial biofilm is held together by vast amounts of discreet cooperation—the bacteria emit all kinds of molecular ‘public goods’ to their neighbours. This …

Haldane’s quip In what circumstances might natural selection favour self-sacrifice? As legend has it, the best known answer to this question was first spoken in a London pub called the Orange Tree. One night in the 1950s, after “calculating on the back of an envelope for some minutes”, J.B.S. Haldane remarked …

What is biological altruism? We tend to think of altruism as action motivated by concern for others. Biologists, however, use the term in a different way. In biology, altruism is, roughly speaking, behaviour that has two distinctive consequences for reproduction: it reduces the chances of reproduction of the organism that performs the behaviour, …