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‘Morals can not be drawn from facts but guidance may be’: the early life of W.D. Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness†

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2015

SARAH A. SWENSON
SARAH A. SWENSON*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota Medical School, 420 Delaware Street SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. Email: swens825@umn.edu.
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Abstract

W.D. Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness saw the evolution of altruism from the point of view of the gene. It was at heart a theory of limits, redefining altruistic behaviours as ultimately selfish. This theory inspired two controversial texts published almost in tandem, E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) and Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (1976). When Wilson and Dawkins were attacked for their evolutionary interpretations of human societies, they claimed a distinction between reporting what is and declaring what ought to be. Can the history of sociobiological theories be so easily separated from its sociopolitical context? This paper draws upon unpublished materials from the 1960s and early 1970s and documents some of the ways in which Hamilton saw his research as contributing to contemporary concerns. It pays special attention to the 1969 Man and Beast Smithsonian Institution symposium in order to explore the extent to which Hamilton intended his theory to be merely descriptive versus prescriptive. From this, we may see that Hamilton was deeply concerned about the political chaos he perceived in the world around him, and hoped to arrive at a level of self-understanding through science that could inform a new social order.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 543 - 563
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Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2015 

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References

1 For one of the most contentious examples of this debate see Ruse, Michael, ‘The romantic conception of Robert J. Richards’, Journal of the History of Biology (2004) 37, pp. 3–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richards, Robert J., ‘Michael Ruse's design for living’, Journal of the History of Biology (2004) 37, pp. 25–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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4 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 3.

5 Dawkins, op. cit. (4), p. 2.

6 Elizabeth Allen, Barbara Beckwith, Jon Beckwith, Steven Chorover, David Culver et al., ‘Against “sociobiology”,’ New York Review of Books, 13 November 1975.

7 E.O. Wilson, ‘For sociobiology’, New York Review of Books, 11 December 1975. Charlotte Sleigh examined Wilson's reticence to endorse analogies between ants and humans and whether we should take these claims at face value in Six Legs Better: A Cultural History of Myrmecology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007, esp. pp. 217, 225. Sleigh also highlighted the influence of Caryl Haskins on Wilson, and it is worthwhile to note that Haskins wrote to Hamilton shortly after the Man and Beast conference to congratulate him on his ‘evocative paper at the Symposium’. C.P. Haskins to W.D. Hamilton, 19 May 1969, W.D. Hamilton papers, British Library, London (subsequently HP), Z1X89/1/6.

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12 See the quotations he claimed ‘started me on this whole business’ in W.D. Hamilton, entry in ‘Tonbridge School. Mathematics’, 4 March 1958, HP, Z1X42/1/6.

13 W.D. Hamilton, ‘New aspects of evolution and their relation to man and human affairs’, n.d., c.1977–1978, HP, Z1X73/1/12.

14 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (ed. Joseph Carroll), Ontario: Broadview, 2003, p. 242.

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18 W.D. Hamilton, ‘Parental altruism in birds etc’, n.d., HP, Z1XUN/1/7. See also Hamilton, handwritten note, ‘Altruistic action pearl: nat. hist. of pop.’, n.d., c.1959–1964, HP, Z1X74/1/9.

19 Niko Tinbergen to W.D. Hamilton, 29 October 1980, HP, Z1X64/1/19.

20 James G. Paradis and George C. Williams, Evolution and Ethics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, pp. 190–191.

21 See, for example, G.C.L. Bertram, Adam's Brood: Hopes and Fears of a Biologist, London: P. Davies, 1959.

22 Robert Ardrey, African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man, London: Collins, 1961, p. 349; appears on note written by W.D. Hamilton, n.d., HP, Z1X40/1/2.

23 F. Fraser Darling, ‘Man and nature: the first of the Reith Lectures’, The Listener, 13 November 1969, pp. 653–656, 655.

24 See, for example, Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, p. 329; Michael Ruse, Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 458; Andrew Brown, The Darwin Wars: How Stupid Genes Became Selfish Gods, London: Simon and Shuster, 1999, p. 83; Michael Ruse, Darwinism and Its Discontents, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 48. The assumed relationship between the theory of inclusive fitness and social insects dates to as early as 1965. See, for example, A.S. Rand to W.D. Hamilton, 14 March 1965, HP, Z1X89/1/1. For a draft of Hamilton's theory that precedes his understanding of social insects see W.D. Hamilton, ‘Natural selection involving competition between relatives’, n.d., c.1960–1962, HP, Z1XUN/2.

25 W.D. Hamilton to T.H. Clutton-Brock, 2 July 1991, HP, Z1X88/2/6.

26 For a more thorough discussion of the development of Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness see Swenson, Sarah A., ‘“From man to bacteria”: W.D. Hamilton, the theory of inclusive fitness, and the post-war social order’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2015) 49, pp. 45–54CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

27 Dawkins, op. cit. (4), p. 10.

28 Wilson, op. cit. (7).

29 See, for example, Dawkins, op. cit. (9), p. 282; Ullica Segerstrale, Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 133; Wilson, op. cit. (3), p. vi.

30 See, for example, Mark E. Borrello, Evolutionary Restraints: The Contentious History of Group Selection, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010; Jumonville, Neil, ‘The cultural politics of the sociobiology debate’, Journal of the History of Biology (2002), pp. 569–593CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shavit, Ayelet, ‘Shifting values partly explain the debate over group selection’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, (2004), pp. 697–720CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Michael Yudell, Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century, New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

31 Hamilton to Clutton-Brock, op. cit. (25).

32 W.D. Hamilton, recorded lecture for Natural Selection and Social Theory, 22 February 1978, HP.

33 W.D. Hamilton to John Pfeiffer, 16 February 1965, HP, Z1X89/1/1, underlining in original.

34 W.D. Hamilton, Human Diversity (1964) by Kenneth Mather, Population Studies (November 1965), p. 203, HP, Z1X37/1/8.

35 W.D. Hamilton, Narrow Roads of Gene Land, 3 vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996–2005, vol. 1, pp. 194–195.

36 Hamilton to Pfeiffer, op. cit. (33).

37 Hamilton to Pfeiffer, op. cit. (33); for an earlier discussion of Hamilton's interest in R.A. Fisher's account of human evolution see W.D. Hamilton to Bettina Hamilton, 21 November 1957, HP, Z1X42/1/16.

38 Hamilton to Pfeiffer, op. cit. (33).

39 W.D. Hamilton, entry in ‘Rough notes’, 14 October 1954, HP, Z1XUN/4, underlining in original.

40 W.D. Hamilton to Mary Hamilton [Bliss], n.d., c. September 1956, HP, Z1X42/1/17.

41 Hamilton, op. cit. (34).

42 See, for example, in one British periodical in 1954 alone, H.S. Deighton, ‘A problem in race relations’, The Listener, 13 May 1954, pp. 809–810; Norman Goodall, ‘Church and race in South Africa’, The Listener, 20 May 1954, pp. 55–56; Alistair Cooke, ‘Negro citizens in the U.S.A.’, The Listener, 10 June 1954, pp. 996–997; Walter Kolarz, ‘The racial problem in the United States’, The Listener, 14 October 1954, pp. 601–602; Ronald E. Robinson, ‘The racial problem in Africa’, The Listener, 16 December 1954, pp. 1051–1052.

43 Brian Harrison, Seeking a Role: The United Kingdom 1951–1970, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 83–84; Mel Risebrow, ‘An analysis of the responses of British government to coloured colonial immigration during the period 1945–1951’, unpublished undergraduate thesis, University of East Anglia, 1983, cited in Peter Hennessy, Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties, London: Penguin, 2007, p. 222.

44 Hennessy, op. cit. (43), p. 222.

45 Lord Salisbury to Oliver Lyttelton, 19 March 1954, quoted in Hennessy, op. cit. (43), p. 224.

46 Harrison, op. cit. (43), p. 220.

47 W.D. Hamilton to Bettina Hamilton, n.d., HP, Z1X42/1/16; W.D. Hamilton to ‘David’, n.d., c. June 1957, HP, Z1X42/1/1.

48 Harrison, op. cit. (43), p. 224.

49 Hamilton to ‘David’, op. cit. (47).

50 Hamilton to ‘David’, op. cit. (47).

51 Hamilton to ‘David’, op. cit. (47).

52 Hamilton to ‘David’, op. cit. (47).

53 W.D. Hamilton to Bettina Hamilton, n.d., HP, Z1X42/1/16.

54 Hamilton to Bettina Hamilton, op. cit. (53).

55 W.D. Hamilton to Bettina Hamilton and A.M. Hamilton, 3 September 1963, HP, Z1X42/1/13.

56 For extended discussion of the biology and biologizing of ‘race’ throughout the twentieth century see Yudell, op. cit. (30).

57 Julian Huxley, The Human Crisis, Washington: University of Washington Press, 1963, pp. 75, 79.

58 Sommer, Marianne, ‘Biology as technology of social justice in interwar Britain: arguments from evolutionary history, heredity, and human diversity’, Science, Technology, & Human Values (2014) 39, pp. 561–586CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 565.

59 Julian Huxley, Evolutionary Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943, p. 59.

60 L. Harrison Matthews, ‘Overt fighting in mammals’, in J.D. Carthy and F.J.G. Ebling (eds.), The Natural History of Aggression, London: Academic Press, 1964, pp. 22–34; HP, Z1X10/1/19.

61 W.D. Hamilton, note in Matthews, op. cit. (60).

62 W.D. Hamilton, ‘Akar, J. (1969)’, n.d., HP, Z1X40/1/1.

63 W.D. Hamilton, ‘Selection of selfish and altruistic behaviour in some extreme models … Abstract’, n.d., c.1969, HP, Z2X29/1/8.

64 W.D. Hamilton, ‘Lorenz, K. (1966) on aggression’, n.d., HP, Z1X40/1/1, underlining in original.

65 Hamilton, op. cit. (64).

66 W.H. Auden, ‘Books of the year: some personal choices’, The Observer, 18 December 1966, p. 23.

67 Adam Raphael, ‘Violence on the roads’, The Guardian, 17 November 1967, p. 10.

68 ‘Paperback pickings’, The Guardian, 26 January 1968, p. 6; Elizabeth Elliott, ‘Letters to the editor’, The Guardian, 28 April 1969, p. 8.

69 S. Dillon Ripley to Henry Allen Moe, draft, n.d., Seminar Records, Smithsonian Institution archives, Washington, DC (subsequently SR), RU000494/3.

70 J.F. Eisenberg, ‘Acknowledgments’, in J.F. Eisenberg and Wilton S. Dillon (eds.), Man and Beast: Comparative Social Behavior, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971, p. 13.

71 Ripley to Moe, op. cit. (69). Hamilton had read and reflected upon Robert Ardrey's first book on the nature of man, African Genesis (1961). There, Ardrey claimed that an understanding of human evolution, and especially anthropologist Raymond Dart's theories, would provide revolutionary insight into the human world.

72 S. Dillon Ripley to Harry F. Guggenheim, 14 October 1968, SR, RU000494/1.

73 S. Dillon Ripley, ‘Announcement’, 3 February 1969, SR, RU000494/3.

74 S. Dillon Ripley to members of the secretariat, 14 June 1967, SR, RU000494/4; Ripley to Guggenheim, op. cit. (72).

75 ‘An interpretation of comparative social behavior for public programs and popular education’, SR, RU000494/4.

76 ‘An interpretation of comparative social behavior’, op. cit. (75).

77 ‘An interpretation of comparative social behavior’, op. cit. (75).

78 ‘An interpretation of comparative social behavior’, op. cit. (75).

79 S. Dillon Ripley to David K.E. Bruce, 25 March 1969, SR, RU000494/4; William W. Warner to Mrs Miles Fitzalan Howard, 17 December 1968, SR, RU000494/4; James Orr to S. Dillon Ripley, 7 January 1969, SR, RU000494/4.

80 W.D. Hamilton, ‘Selection of selfish and altruistic behaviour in some extreme models’, n.d., c.1969, HP, Z2X29/1/8.

81 Hamilton, op. cit. (80).

82 Hamilton, op. cit. (80).

83 Hamilton, op. cit. (35), vol. 1, pp. 190–191.

84 Hamilton, op. cit. (80).

85 Hamilton, op. cit. (80).

86 Hamilton, op. cit. (63).

87 Hamilton, op. cit. (35), vol. 1, p. 186.

88 Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, p. 5.

89 Ronald Reagan, quoted in ‘Riots and ’68’, National Review Bulletin, 15 August 1967, pp. 4–5, 5.

90 ‘The violence’, The Nation, 14 August 1967, p. 101.

91 See, for example, Philip A. McCombs, ‘Who is behind the race riots?’, National Review, 20 September 1966, pp. 934–935, 934.

92 ‘The Cleveland affair’, National Review, 13 August 1968, pp. 789–790, 789.

93 Robin Fox, Participant Observer: Memoir of a Transatlantic Life, New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 2004, p. 417; ‘Budget’, 27 April 1969, SR, RU000494/3; Ripley to Guggenheim, op. cit. (72).

94 S. Dillon Ripley to Douglas D. Bond, 9 January 1969, SR, RU000494/3.

95 Ripley to Bond, op. cit. (94).

96 ‘Financing the Symposium’, n.d., SR, RU000494/3. The Russell Sage Foundation is a private American foundation with a mission to improve living conditions. The Commonwealth Fund was founded in 1918, and in the 1960s it was especially concerned with improving health care in urban communities. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation was founded in 1934, and aims to fund research that will improve science, technology or economic performance, and support public understanding of these fields. The author could not find more information about the Grant Foundation or the Luana Foundation at this time.

97 John A. Schneider to S. Dillon Ripley, 5 March 1969, SR, RU000494/3.

98 Paul R. Ignatius to S. Dillon Ripley, 4 April 1969, SR, RU000494/3.

99 Marshall K. Evans to S. Dillon Ripley, 31 March 1969, SR, RU000494/3.

100 Alfred R. Schneider to S. Dillon Ripley, 23 April 1969, SR, RU000494/3.

101 J.A. Linen to S. Dillon Ripley, 14 February 1969, SR, RU000494/3; see also W.M. Bennett to S. Dillon Ripley, 4 March 1969, SR, RU000494/3.

102 Harry F. Guggenheim to S. Dillon Ripley, 1 November 1968, SR, RU000494/1.

103 See articles held in SR, RU000494/3, including Herman Schaden, ‘Behavior of man and beast is topic at Smithsonian’, Washington Star, 23 March 1969; Phil Casey, ‘It's not that simple: man's aggressive inheritance questioned’, Washington Post, 15 May 1969; John Leo, ‘Expert says man can change in 10 generations’, New York Times, 15 May 1969.

104 Alan M. Kriegsman, ‘A pernicious source of confusion’, Washington Post, 17 May 1969, SR, RU000494/3. For a detailed account of Fulbright's life see Randall Bennett Woods, Fulbright: A Biography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

105 Herman Schaden, ‘A mini-symposium: Fulbright and the scholars’, Washington Star, 16 May 1969, SR, RU000494/3.

106 Schaden, op. cit. (105).

107 Phil Casey, ‘Behaving better than we do’, Washington Post, 16 May 1969, SR, RU000494/3.

108 Ann Cottrell Free, ‘Meet Louis Halle, example of a vanishing species’, Washington Star, 25 May 1969, SR, RU000494/3.

109 Theodosius Dobzhansky, ‘The present evolution of man’, Scientific American (1960) 203, p. 206.

110 Louis J. Halle, quoted in William Delaney, ‘A matter of manners: attitude shift held man's key to survival’, Washington Star, 17 May 1969, SR, RU000494/3.

111 J. illiam Fulbright, quoted in Delaney, op. cit. (110).

112 Yudell, op. cit. (30), has characterized the relationship between sociobiology and racism similarly.

113 Hamilton, op. cit. (17).

114 W.D. Hamilton, ‘Penultimate lecture 1970’, n.d., c.1970, HP, Z1X90/1/22; Hamilton, bibliography for Social Biology lectures, n.d., c.1971, HP, Z1X90/1/7.

115 W.D. Hamilton, ‘Animals in the prisoner's dilemma’, 1971, HP, Z2X29/1/12.

116 W.D. Hamilton, ‘Population control’, New Scientist, 20 October 1969, pp. 260–261.

117 W.D. Hamilton, ‘Lecture 12’, n.d., c.1971, HP, Z1X90/1/13.

118 W.D. Hamilton, ‘Incest of mice and men’, 4 August 1974, HP, Z2X29/1/13.

119 W.D. Hamilton, manuscript with no title, n.d., c. early 1970s, HP, Z1X90/1/18.

120 Alan Grafen, ‘William Donald Hamilton’, in Hamilton, op. cit. (35), vol. 3, p. 431.

121 See, for example, E.O. Wilson, ‘Slavery in ants’, Scientific American (1975) 232(6), pp. 32–36; Dawkins, op. cit. (8); Masters, Roger D., ‘Is sociobiology reactionary? The political implications of inclusive-fitness theory’, Quarterly Review of Biology (1982) 57(3), pp. 275–292CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Richard Dawkins, ‘The better self can transcend the selfish gene’, The Observer, 15 October 1989, p. 61.

122 John Maynard Smith, review of ‘In the safety of confusion: the sociobiology debate’, New Scientist, 29 March 1979, p. 1051.

123 For a recent discussion of the naturalistic fallacy and its persistence see the recent ‘Focus’ section in Isis (2014) 105(3), pp. 569–616, featuring Brooke Holmes, ‘Greco-Roman ethics and the naturalistic fantasy’; Lorraine Daston, ‘The naturalistic fallacy is modern’; Matthew Stanley, ‘From ought to is: physics and the naturalistic fallacy; Erika Lorraine Milam, ‘A field study of con games’; Warwick Anderson, ‘Getting ahead of one's self? The common culture of immunology and philosophy’. Piers J. Hale, Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014.

124 Hodgson, Geoffrey M., ‘Social darwinism in anglophone academic journals’, Journal of Historical Sociology (2004) 17, pp. 428–463CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, New York: Knopf, 1985.

125 Nathaniel C. Comfort, The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.

126 Sommer, Marianne, ‘From descent to ascent: the human exception in the evolutionary synthesis’, Nuncius (2010) 25, pp. 41–67CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Here she refers to Julian Huxley, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr and George Gaylord Simpson.

127 Borrello, op. cit. (30).

128 Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenäus, ‘The fighting behavior of animals’, Scientific American (1961) 205, pp. 117–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

129 Corning, Peter A., ‘Evolution and ethics … an idea whose time has come?’, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems (1996) 19(3), pp. 277–285Google Scholar, 277–278.

130 Corning, op. cit. (129).

131 Robert Trivers, recorded lecture for Natural Selection and Social Theory, 19 April 1978, HP.

132 See especially Lee Alan Dugatkin, The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. x, 94; Grafen, op. cit. (120), p. 424.

133 Ullica Segerstrale, Nature's Oracle: The Life and Work of W.D. Hamilton, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 3.

134 Segerstrale, op. cit. (133), p. 5.

135 Marek Kohn, A Reason for Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination, London: Faber and Faber, 2004, pp. 23–24; A.J. Lustig, ‘William Donald Hamilton’, in New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008, pp. 225–235.

136 Segerstrale, op. cit. (133), p. 334.

137 Grafen, op. cit. (120), p. 447.

138 Trivers, op. cit. (131).

139 Trivers, op. cit. (131).

140 As he did in Robert Trivers, recorded lecture for Natural Selection and Social Theory, 1 February 1978, HP.

141 Robert Trivers to W.D. Hamilton, 27 May 1977, HP, Z1X69/1/12.

142 Trivers to Hamilton, op. cit. (141).

143 W.D. Hamilton to E.O. Wilson, 13 December 1974, HP, Z1X69/1/12.

144 W.D. Hamilton, ‘3 Nov. 1977’, HP, Z1X90/1/18.

145 Hamilton, op. cit. (144).

146 W.D. Hamilton, ‘Outline of genetics course for third year zoologists’, n.d., c. early 1970s, HP, Z1X90/1/21.