Free A Small Furry Prayer by Steven Kotler Page B

another. … [A tribe] always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.”
    This was the invention of an idea called group selection and for the next hundred years it held fast. It fell fast in the 1960s when mathematical models were introduced to evolutionary biology. Once scientists started modeling altruism, free riders became the problem. “Even if altruism is advantageous at the group level,” says the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ,
    within any group altruists are liable to be exploited by selfish “free-riders” who refrain from behaving altruistically. These free-riders will have an obvious fitness advantage: they benefit from the altruism of others, but do not incur any of the costs. So even if a group is composed exclusively of altruists, all behaving nicely towards each other, it only takes a single selfish mutant to bring an end to this happy idyll. By virtue of its relative fitness advantage within the group, the selfish mutant will out-reproduce the altruists, hence selfishness will eventually swamp altruism. Since the generation time of individual organisms is likely to be much shorter than that of groups, the probability that a selfish mutant will arise and spread is very high, according to this line of argument.
    In 1976, Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins reduced things further, arguing in The Selfish Gene that it didn’t really matter on what level evolution occurred: genes were the “fundamental unit of selection,” and since a gene’s only function is the inherently selfish self-replication, any selection pressure applied at the group level would be completely negated at the individual level. Altruism became kin selection —we help those who are closely related to us—or reciprocal altruism —we help those who help us—and the world became a crueler place.
    While Dawkins’s ideas still dominate today, dog rescue—or what’s technically known as cross-species altruism—isn’t easily explained by selfish genetics. Since dogs are not our species, kin selection immediately falls apart. Meanwhile, reciprocal altruism runs into an entirely different wall. Because genes are the fundamental unit of selection, the cornerstone of reciprocal altruism isn’t just that we help those who help us—it’s that we help those who help us pass on our genes. But no matter what rescuers do for animals, none of it is going to help them pass along their genes.
    To get around this, the few researchers who have considered cross-species altruism argue for “reputation models”: the idea that being kind to animals enhances one’s reputation in the community and that enhancement is beneficial to survival. Unfortunately, no one I knew thought allocating a considerable chunk of my income to dogs was a particularly good idea. Plus, because of animal zoning laws and pets-per-household limits, most rescuers live in places with a sparse human population, so you can enhance their reputations all you want, but there’s still no one around to notice.
    And that’s it. The end of the scientific line. The extent of our best thinking on the matter. Perhaps this wouldn’t all be so perplexing if animal rescue was just a tiny movement, but a 2002 and 2003 survey conducted by the Humane Society of the United States identified ten thousand animal protection groups, a number that, according to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), has since risen above twelve thousand. Some are mom-and-pop shops similar to what Joy and I had started; many are significantly larger. More than three thousand have freestanding buildings for their animals. One hundred and fifty private shelters and three hundred public ones have operating budgets in excess of one million dollars. In total, Americans spend about two and a