Culture, Not Genes, Help Us Give Unto Others

Call it what you will: altruism, self-sacrifice, kindness. Scientists say helping behavior among strangers appears to be a product of culture more than genetics, according to an article in the most recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Adrian V. Bell and colleagues from the University of California, Davis.

"Altruism has perplexed evolutionary and social scientists and biologists for a long time," Bell said in an interview on the National Science Foundation's Web site. "It's hard to argue how behaviors that are so costly to an individual [could be evolutionary] when they put at risk any genetic descendants."

Bell "used a mathematical equation, called the Price equation, that describes the conditions for altruism to evolve," according to an NSF article on his work. "Using previously calculated estimates of genetic differences, they used the World Values Survey (whose questions are likely to be heavily influenced by culture in a large number of countries) as a source of data to compute the cultural differentiation between the same neighboring groups."

"Our numbers show that socially learned behavior or belief is a much better explanation for pro-social activities in large societies -- things like soldiers giving their lives in war, blood and food banks, giving to strangers -- than is a genetic factor favored by natural selection."

Much of Bell's work took place in Tonga, a chain of islands, where it is easier to track how cultural beliefs change as people move to different islands. Bell currently is designing an experiment to examine cultural beliefs in Tonga and "measure the effect of migration on the similarities and differences between populations."

Photo courtesy of unincorporated, via Flickr