Wilson is certain that it’s not by selecting for the fittest individuals within a group, as the popular picture of natural selection would suggest. The reason is simple. Tradeoffs are the norm in life and when individuals act to further their own interests they generally don’t further the interests of the group. Indeed individuals can often do best by cheating, that is by shirking their group duties and looking out for numero uno.
.. So then how can group function and altruism evolve? Simple, says Wilson: groups that include more altruists generally perform better as groups than groups that include fewer altruists. To return to our ants, a colony in which everyone selflessly plays their part is a healthy colony that functions, survives, and ultimately gives rise to a new colony more readily than would a colony that harbors selfish ants. In the language of biology, selecting for the fittest groups can increase the number of altruists through time.
.. Scientists, Wilson says, should be schooled in the idea of equivalence just as they are in hypothesis testing. This might well prevent scientists from wasting precious research time in futile debates over which bookkeeping scheme is fundamentally “correct,” a fate, he says, that plagued discussion of the levels of selection until recently.
.. Given its effectiveness in suppressing selfishness, Wilson, while a nonbeliever, appears respectfully tolerant of religious practice and distances himself from the heated rhetoric of “New Atheists” such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.
.. He tells us about Ayn Rand’s economic fundamentalism and walks us through Flash Boys, Michael Lewis’s account of high-frequency traders on Wall Street. Recoiling in a mix of moral and intellectual horror, he announces that “it was a monumental mistake to conclude that something as complex as a large society can self-organize on the basis of individual greed.”
.. Indeed Wilson argues that the only legitimate version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand is one that moves at the level of whole societies, sorting those economic arrangements that work from those that don’t. Wilson provides no examples here but, from his tone, it seems likely that he’d include American capitalist markets among those arrangements that don’t work for the benefit of people generally.
.. This isn’t to say that Wilson is necessarily wrong here and economists are right. But it is to say that it’s easy to win a debate when the other side’s arguments don’t get a fair hearing.