Word: altruism
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Indeed, few academic theories have spread so fast and with so little hard proof. Apart from the Hamilton-Trivers work on altruism, there has been little to impress the skeptics, and no hard evidence has been presented to show that genes influence human cultural behavior. The power of sociobiology comes from its astonishing promise to link the physical sciences with the human sciences and to bring all behavior from Drosophila to Homo sapiens under one great discipline...
Sociobiology tries to resolve the dilemma. Its solution: altruism is actually genetic selfishness. The bird that warns of an approaching hawk is protecting nearby relatives that have many of the same genes it has?thus increasing the chance that some of those genes will survive. Sterile female insects work and give their lives to promote the spread of genes they share with their sisters...
British Biologist William Hamilton in 1964 explained how altruism could help an individual spread his genes; he argued that the principle explained the social life of insects...
Still, there are problems in explaining all altruism as a direct investment in one's own genes. For example, some birds give warning cries for the flock even when their young and close relatives are absent. Trivers proposed a solution in a 1971 paper on reciprocal altruism that has become a central text for sociobiologists. "In other organisms," Trivers wrote, "the evidence that altruism is genetic is rather overwhelming. It is therefore irrational to argue that the first species in which altruism has no genetic contribution is human beings." Using game theory, he concluded that natural selection produces individuals that...
...many, such explanations of noble deeds are cold comfort. But Harvard Anthropologist Melvin J. Konner sees a bright side to reciprocal altruism. Sociobiologists, he says, "have in fact uplifted [human nature] by showing that altruism, long thought to be a thin cultural veneer, belongs instead to the deepest part of our being, produced by countless aeons of consistent evolution...