Altruism: A Scientific Perspective

Scientist Douglas A. Vakoch explains how the universal language of mathematics might communicate the complicated concept of altruism, and why what we say is as important as how we say it.

by Douglas A. Vakoch

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2001—Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) experiments have increased remarkably in power during the past forty years, both in sensitivity and in the multitude of stars examined.

The SETI Institute, a Mountain View, California-based non-profit research organization, uses the world’s largest radio telescope to examine one thousand nearby stars. Thanks to increases in computational power, this ongoing project is trillions of times more effective than Frank Drake’s first search in 1960.

Recently, the SETI Institute has begun to draft reply messages of the sort that might someday be sent to intelligent beings around other stars. With funding from the John Templeton Foundation, we are using the language of math and science to compose interstellar messages that describe altruism as we encounter it on Earth. Our goal is to start a dialogue about what we should say in messages to extraterrestrials and how we could say it. By addressing these issues through the concrete project of drafting possible replies, we will be in a better position to decide whether we should send any messages at all.

We’re narrowing our options by considering the sorts of ideas that we can communicate. Mathematician Carl L. DeVito suggests that certain aspects of religious belief may be very difficult to convey. “How can you ask an alien if he -- she? it? -- believes in God?” DeVito asks. “How can you even begin to define your terms?”

Extraterrestrials and human beings may have considerably different ways of encountering their worlds, but mathematics, physics, and chemistry operate the same throughout the galaxy. By describing altruism in terms of mathematical and scientific universals, we might overcome the linguistic differences between extraterrestrials and ourselves.

Altruism has another advantage as a human introduction: Extraterrestrials may be curious about it. Astronomer Guillermo Lemarchand has argued that the first messages we get from extraterrestrials may be devoid of information about advanced science and technology. He reasons that extraterrestrials would give us only information that would be safe for us to have. More detailed messages, Lemarchand says, would wait until the extraterrestrials learned something about our sense of morality.

Yet even if we have succeeded in establishing a basic language of math and science, the question remains, What next? How can we describe some of our most basic human traits -- like our ability to love? One discipline that attempts to bridge the gap between biology and culture is sociobiology.

Sociobiology is particularly useful for our project because it is based on ideas of natural selection laid out by Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century. And if biologist Richard Dawkins is correct, we have good reason to expect that extraterrestrials will know about the same evolutionary processes we see on Earth.

As Dawkins puts it, a Darwinian account of evolution “is not merely incidentally true of our kind of life but almost certainly true of all life, everywhere in the universe.” By Dawkins’ analysis, “Darwinism really matters in the universe.”

Dawkins also contends that much of social behavior and culture can be explained by evolutionary processes. Taking his lead, let’s see how far we can get if we try to communicate altruism in evolutionary terms.

In Darwin’s account of the survival of the fittest, those individuals best adapted to their environments are most likely to live another day and so are more likely to reproduce. Consequently, the fittest individuals have more offspring, who share some of their parents’ adaptive traits. Darwin didn’t want his theory to stop at explaining the transmission of physical characteristics from generation to generation: He also wanted to account for the evolution of behavior.

One of Darwin’s biggest challenges was explaining how altruism could have evolved. For example, a single bird within a flock might act as a sentry, giving a warning call when a predator approaches. By receiving advance warning, the other birds in the flock have a better chance of escaping the predator. But this comes at a price to the sentry. A warning call attracts a lot of attention, making the sentry an easier target for the predator.

How could a trait for such altruism be passed on from generation to generation? If altruistic birds are more likely to be preyed upon, then fewer altruists would survive to reproduce. Eventually, altruism should die out.

Redefining biological fitness resolves this paradox. Darwin thought of fitness as the ability of an individual to survive and reproduce, yielding offspring to carry on some of his or her traits. If a mother gives up her life for her daughter, the mother ceases to exist. But genetically, the mother continues to live on in her child. Although the mother as an individual does not benefit by her own altruism, half of her genetic information survives.

With this new formulation, the biological fitness of a trait is evaluated in terms beyond the mere natural selection of individuals. The focus shifts from individual fitness to inclusive fitness, which takes into account the survival of an individual’s relatives. Evolution is no longer seen simply as a process of individual selection but also as kin selection.

Because kin selection can be quantified precisely, it translates into interstellar messages by drawing on the universal language of mathematics. Indeed, a message like the one transmitted in 1974 from the world’s largest radio telescope describes basic numbers and the biochemical building blocks of our genes. Primers such as this, based on math and chemistry, provide a natural starting point for more elaborate messages that describe the evolution of our bodies and our behavior.

For example, once we have communicated basic principles of arithmetic, like addition and division, it’s a short step to explaining fractions. And with fractions, we can describe how closely individuals are related to one another. For instance, a grandmother shares one-fourth of her genes with each of her grandchildren. With a few basic mathematical and chemical principles, we can describe the genetic basis of kin selection.

Kin selection provides an account of seemingly sacrificial acts: What appears to be a sacrifice at the level of the individual may really be selfish at the level of the gene. But kin selection offers no help in explaining why we sometimes help people unrelated to us.

Take the example of modern hunter-gatherer societies, which may be similar to the civilizations of our pre-agricultural ancestors. It should come as no surprise that successful hunters share their food with others in the group, some of whom are closely related. But why, from an evolutionary perspective, should one group of hunters share their food with a distinct, un-related group -- as is often observed?

For this, sociobiologists invoke the idea of reciprocal altruism. The group with a successful hunt today may fail tomorrow, next week, and in the coming months.

If we wish to create interstellar messages that describe our highest goals and not simply our biological proclivities, we might also include an account of our aspirations to be more altruistic -- both to those close to home and to those more distant from us.

In hunter-gatherer societies, meat is often scarce. By sharing with other groups today, one can hope for reciprocity tomorrow.

When we communicate reciprocal altruism through interstellar messages, we can describe the costs and benefits -- of sharing food, for example -- in terms of numbers. To be sure, quantitative formulas about reciprocal altruism do not capture all the nuances of how humans relate to one another in our world, but they do allow us to express one of the general principles involved in across-group caring. That’s a good start for making contact with another civilization that has its own evolutionary history and culture.

Indeed, linguist Derek Bickerton has suggested that reciprocal altruism was a prerequisite for the flexibility of human languages. Whereas most animals have a fairly small set of fixed signals they can send to one another, humans communicate novel ideas by arranging words in many ways. Bickerton argues that the origin of complex sentences can be traced back to our ancestors’ need to keep track of exchanges with others. A message describing reciprocal altruism might also introduce extraterrestrials to the structure of human language.

But kin selection and reciprocal altruism do not provide a complete account of altruism. Sociobiologists would acknowledge as much, though some would continue to look for additional explanations primarily through science.

As ethicist Stephen Pope has noted, we have a hard time reconciling a sociobiological account of altruism -- based on love of kin and neighbors -- with the sort of self-sacrifice held as an ideal among many of the world’s religions and secular ideologies. How are we to explain the myth of Nama Buddha, who is said to have given his own flesh to feed a starving tiger? How are we to make sense of New Testament accounts of Jesus’ self-sacrifice for all people? Can these be explained purely by sociobiology?

Some aspects of altruism may be not biologically driven but culturally encouraged. If we want a more complete account of human altruism, we need to explain how we promote our values.

According to Pope, reflections on our ethical ideals can help us move beyond love for our relatives and neighbors to care for strangers as well. But love doesn’t come easily. As Pope summarizes the views of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, “virtue is not implanted in us by nature but formed by habit, and therefore … the moral life is a matter of gradually shaping these emotional responses … into forms which promote the human good.”

If we wish to create interstellar messages that describe our highest goals and not simply our biological proclivities, we might also include an account of our aspirations to be more altruistic -- both to those close to home and to those more distant from us.

And even if the extraterrestrials have difficulty understanding the content of our messages, the very act of transmitting a reply would tell the recipients something about human altruism. Any message we send will not be received for years, decades, or even centuries. A round-trip exchange may take much longer than a human lifetime.

So by transmitting a message to extraterrestrials, we also would send an important message to ourselves. We would remind ourselves that, at times, we are a caring, giving civilization, not solely focused on our short-term gratification, but willing to provide something for future generations -- both on Earth and on a world orbiting a distant star.

A research project director at the SETI Institute, Douglas A. Vakoch chairs a workshop on Interstellar Message Composition in late September in Toulouse, France.

Other stories in this feature package:
Altruism: An Introduction
Encoding Altruism
Altruism: A Theological Perspective