Is Altruism Embedded in Our DNA?

How evolutionary biologists help economists explain why we want what we want

“Illuminated DNA Strands.” Image by Robert Graboyes (with AI assist).

NOTE: I’m posting excerpts from my not-yet-published book, “Fifty-Million-Dollar Baby: A Skeptic’s Eyes on Economics, Ethics, and Health.” The goal is to edit the manuscript in plain view—to seek your comments, corrections, and suggestions. Some passages of today’s piece were taken from my “Why We Want What We Want,” in the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond’s Equilibria magazine from 2001/2002.

BEYOND RATIONALITY AND SELFISHNESS

Altruism fits uncomfortably (if at all) in traditional economic models, where humans are assumed to be rational, self-interested calculating machines. “Homo Economicus” (“Economic Man”) catalogs all options available to him (goods, services, hobbies, leisure) and chooses the combination that gives him the greatest utility (happiness). In its crudest form, each individual’s utility depends only on how much stuff he himself consumes—with the well-being of others nowhere in the equation. No economist believes that people actually are so selfish or calculating, but assuming so (i.e., “pretending” so) confers three benefits:

• It restricts economists to a limited range of issues and provides a common vocabulary;

• It offers useful insights into a great deal of human behavior; and

• It forces economists to respect their subjects. They can’t simply write, “People smoke cigarettes because they’re stupid.” Instead, they must ask, “Why do intelligent people smoke, given that they understand the dangers?”

However, the assumption of simplistic rationality discourages economists from investigating some of life’s most interesting questions—how we make decisions, why we want what we want, and why we are sometimes altruistic. It’s a matter of convenience and pragmatism—not that economists haven’t heard of St. Francis of Assisi, Oskar Schindler, Johnny Appleseed, and Florence Nightingale.

In recent decades, however, psychologists, ethicists, and biologists have helped economists develop a new scientific literature in which self-interest and altruism are mutually supportive desires. Some analyses suggest that this complementarity is hardwired into our DNA—biology whispering commands beneath our consciousness. Several Economics Nobel Prizes have stemmed at least in part from this literature: Vernon Smith and Daniel Kahneman (2002), Robert Aumann and Thomas Schelling (2005), Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson (2009), and Richard Thaler (2017). To understand this new literature, we’ll visit with monkeys, Neanderthals, and The Godfather.

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SURVIVAL OF THE NICEST

In 1997, Thomas Gale Moore, an economist at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution (who died in 2024) wrote the following in his working paper, “A Reformulation of Utility Theory, or, It All Comes from Sex”:

“Economics has long found itself in the dock, accused of being the imperial discipline conquering all other social sciences. The profession must now face having the tables turned and being taken over by a new science that will include standard economics as a special subsection. Just as Einstein’s theory of relativity turned Newton’s theory of gravity into a special case, so evolutionary psychology contains utility theory as one very useful but limited paradigm.”

Evolutionary biology can help explain why you might sacrifice all of your savings to save a sibling, but maybe not a cousin. Evolutionary biologists assume that we have eyes, hearts, thumbs, and spleens because organisms with those structures were more likely to pass their DNA on to descendants than organisms without those structures. By their reasoning, we tend to fear snakes, enjoy the company of dogs, prefer cooked meat, avoid rotten-smelling water, and so forth, because ancient people with these traits were more likely to have descendants in the year 2024 than people who liked snakes, hated dogs, craved raw meat, and drank from swamps.

By the same logic, altruism might be hard-wired into our genes. Children whose parents love them and fear for their safety may be more likely to survive and bear offspring than children whose parents do not care for them. Generous, sociable people might be safer from attack than the neighborhood loner.

Evolutionary psychologists hypothesize that humans feel love, hate, curiosity, angst, empathy, inventiveness, sympathy, grief, and so forth because (in retrospect) people with those traits were more likely to have descendants than people without those traits. Similarly, our desires to trade, invent, and accumulate wealth may be hardwired into our brains because people who did those things were more likely than others to have descendants today.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins theorized about a “selfish gene.” This idea is that humans are driven to preserve their own DNA through the generations—and sometimes, this is best accomplished by sacrificing personal well-being for the benefit of others who share our DNA. History is filled with parents who risked or sacrificed their lives to save their children. Asked whether he would lay down his life for his brother, the biologist J.B.S. Haldane responded, “No—but for two brothers or eight cousins.” Why? Because on average, two brothers have as much of your DNA as you do, as do eight first cousins.

It’s as if our genes are out doing whatever they can to preserve themselves, and we’re just along for the ride. Evolutionary psychologists don’t believe that any more than economists believe people are completely rational. Like rationality, the selfish-gene assumption is just an analytical tool that the researcher hopes will provide some good predictions about human behavior. Importantly, evolutionary psychologists also don’t argue that genes determine our behavior, but only give us tendencies. Fear of snakes is prevalent, not universal, and even snake-loathers can learn to like them. (When I was 11, I visited a museum where Big Jim Fowler from TV’s Wild Kingdom draped a huge boa constrictor around me. I rather liked the experience. Especially when the serpent’s head disappeared up my shirt-sleeve.)

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MONKEYS, NEANDERTHALS, AND DON CORLEONE

George Mason University economist Robin Hanson wrote a splendid piece (“Showing That You Care”) on the convergence of self-interest and altruism. He sought to explain why employers in the U.S. offer overly generous health insurance benefits, rather than purchasing sparser but adequate plans and raising salaries with the cost differential.

Hanson began by describing the behavior of macaque monkeys. One of their traits is that disabled members of the troop (amputees, etc.) survive to old age via the largesse of communal leaders. This would seem to conflict with Darwinism’s “survival of the fittest.” Shouldn’t bands of monkeys let disabled members die, since they’re only consumers, and not producers?

But communal life is more complex than Social Darwinism. Hanson conjectured that the powerful leader may feed and protect injured members as a way of signaling that he is so rich and so powerful that he can afford to give away excess food and devote some of his vigilance to protecting this poor compatriot. This sends a message to other members of the band: “If you are ever in the same situation, I can do the same for you. Hence, if I’m ever threatened, you should protect me, because you’ll never find another philanthropist like me.”

Hanson also describes similar evidence regarding Neanderthals. Ancient graves have been found containing skeletons of individuals who were clearly unable to fend for themselves but who somehow lived to old age.

Henry Ford paid employees “efficiency wages”—higher than the going wage rates for their skill levels. He did so because it induced them to work harder and remain with the company longer, because they knew no one else would pay them that well.

When I described Hanson’s paper to my wife, she said, “Oh, that’s just like Don Corleone in The Godfather”:

“Someday — and that day may never come—I’ll call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, accept this justice as a gift on my daughter’s wedding day.”

In other words, altruism can be an investment.

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KINDER, GENTLER RATIONALITY

How might this fit into economics? The idea is that people form economic relationships that, looking back, have improved our chances for survival. People are not only willing to sacrifice their lives for their children, they are also willing to sacrifice their personal wealth for them. (Pay for the child’s education so that child can marry and have children who will carry Grandpa and Grandma’s genes.) A woman may generously give money to her brother-in-law for his new business. (If the business prospers, her sister may be more likely to have children who survive to pass along the family’s DNA.) Your cousins share less of your DNA than your siblings do, so you’re less likely to finance their businesses. And doing nice things for other people might one day save your life or win you a spouse—either of which can increase the likelihood of your DNA surviving into the future.

Evolutionary psychologists hope to explain economic mysteries beyond altruism, as well. Universally, people seek to accumulate wealth, though folk tales, literature, gossip, and research suggest that wealth doesn’t, on average, bring happiness. Why, then, do most of us prefer more to less? Perhaps it’s that over the millennia, people who craved material wealth had more children and saw fewer of them die of starvation and illness. So, our genes whisper, “Psst! Work a few more hours, and you’ll be able to buy that expensive car!” We listen because, to our ancestors’ ears, the message sounded like, “Psst! Work a few more hours, and you’ll be able to store more beans for the cold winter.”

Psycholinguist and evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker speculated that language developed for the same reason—that people who could speak were more likely to produce offspring than people who couldn’t. Language is what makes trade and commerce nearly unique to humans. So, our desires to buy and sell and travel the world may also reflect some ancient drive that helped our ancestors survive.

Economics and evolutionary theory have long been intertwined in an intellectual double helix. Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, showed that in an economy characterized by voluntary trade, the deeds of self-interested accidentally do good for their fellow humans (the “Invisible Hand”). Nobelist Vernon Smith noted that Adam Smith’s concept of self-interest was broad enough to include purposeful “gifts, assistance, and favors out of sympathy.”

The Invisible Hand helped inspire Charles Darwin’s vision of competing organisms acting almost as a collective intelligence (Invisible Tentacle? Invisible Paw?), shaping earth’s species as if by design to select those species most likely to survive. Some political economists of the mid- to late-Nineteenth Century molded their social theories around Darwinian notions, stretching the analogy to serve their own prejudices. In the extremes, some Marxists and Social Darwinists alike saw economic competition as wolves devouring sheep. Marxists sympathized with the sheep and called for the market’s destruction; Social Darwinists sympathized with the wolves, raising a glass of expensive sherry to the victory of strong over weak, rich over poor.

Both Marxists and Social Darwinists failed to grasp the gulf between Adam Smith’s idea of competition and Darwin’s. Smith wrote of voluntary trade, where rich and poor could both walk away from the bargaining table mutually satisfied. Darwin described encounters where one party walked away satisfied and the other party never walked away at all—wolves and sheep don’t do deals.

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HOMO ECONOMICUS VERSUS HOMO SAPIENS IN SONG

Here are our two economic archetypes, represented in song. We hear the harsh persona of rational, self-interested Homo Economicus in “Money (That’s What I Want),” performed in 1979 by The Flying Lizards (Deborah Evans-Stickland on vocals). The gentler, more altruistic notion of Homo Sapiens is found in “Try a Little Kindness,” sung by Glen Campbell, performed in 1979.

Robert F. Graboyes is president of RFG Counterpoint, LLC in Alexandria, Virginia. An economist, journalist, and musician, he holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. An award-winning professor, in 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. He publishes Bastiat’s Window, a Substack-based journal of economics, science, and culture. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.