Free Brain Trust by Garth Sundem Page B

the altruism equation: r × b > c. If relatedness times benefit outweighs cost, then you help. You’d throw yourself infront of a train to save two of your siblings or eight of your cousins, but not one of your sibs or seven of your cousins. This is because, on some level, you recognize that a sibling has half of your genes—saving two brothers passes on the equivalent of your genetic material. Same with eight cousins. Similar might be true of an airplane full of people of your ethnicity, or a cruise ship full of people from all over the world. Altruism makes sense “if you can somehow make up for the cost of being altruistic by increasing the chances that your genetic relatives survive and reproduce,” says Dugatkin.
    Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon famously studied this relationship of altruism and kinship among the Yanomami of Venezuela. From the mid-1960s to late 1990s, when Chagnon lived with the Yanomami, they were into all sorts of nifty things like periodically banding together in ever-changing alliances to cut off heads, shrink them, eat people, etc. Chagnon almost lost his noggin more than once, but survived to compile extensive genealogies of the Yanomami, showing interrelatedness among the many widely dispersed tribal groups. And what he found is a clean (inverse) correlation between relatedness and the likelihood you’ll chop off and shrink someone’s head and/or eat them. Even without prior knowledge of kinship, the Yanomami somehow knew not to eat family.
    “I think the human psyche has been designed to pick up clues that come from gene expression,” says Dugatkin. Certainly, studies have shown that we’re very, very good at recognizing people we’re related to, even without having met them before. What cues this recognition? Is it genetic? “Even the evolutionary biologists are trying to develop models of culture in which the gene is not the central player,” says Dugatkin, “but this thing called a meme that represents information is the unit that selection operates on.”
    So, the theory goes, when we instantly recognize a long-lost relative in a lineup, it’s not that we somehow intuit this relative’sgenetic makeup—it’s that we similarly intuit memes, or the many signals not only of genetics but of cultural similarity, including Aunt Joan’s clipped “T’s,” Great Uncle Wilbur’s habit of winking as punctuation, and Grandpa Gary’s bad sense of humor that makes one pepper terrible puns throughout a book of scientific tips.
    This reliance on memes rather than genes to determine relatedness bodes well for your ability to fool others into being altruistic toward you—to, for instance, make them give you money—for while it’s rather cumbersome to change your genetic structure to be more similar to that of a person you’re hitting up, changing your memetic structure—the ways you signal genetic similarity—is totally doable. “There are ways to create the illusion of genetic relatedness among people,” says Dugatkin. “Look at the military or religious organizations referring to people as brothers.” This language creates false kinship … and people in these organizations help one another.
    Further evidence for the power of kinship language comes from another sort of evolution. How many lines do you think a panhandler tries in a career of begging? And why do you think some lines become more used than others? Because they work, that’s why—the others are selected against. And what’s the stereotypical, clichéd panhandling line? It’s “Brother, can you spare a dime?” By implying relatedness, the panhandler thumbs the scale of the altruism equation and makes it in your genetic interest to give (remember: Relatedness times benefit must outweigh cost).
    And if you’re going to try to get money or other aid out of a population, you’d do well to walk like them and talk like them too. “We use similarity as a proxy for kinship,” says Dugatkin, “and the slightest