When I was a boy I stepped on a beehive at my uncle's farm. It was an honest mistake, but the consequences were grim. My sister, just behind me, was stung by tens of angry honeybees: on her legs, and arms, and stomach, even in her ears. The guilty culprit, I escaped with but a single sting on my little finger. As our panicked mother rushed to help sis with chunks of ice in soothing wet towels, I sat on the grass and found the bee whose sting remained launched in my pinky. It lay dead, it's entrails severed by the sting's penetration of my skin. Danna was crying out loud now, as much from pain as from fright. But all I can remember thinking to myself was: What a valiant bee it was, laying severed in the grass, who would sacrifice itself for the good of the hive.
Turns out Darwin had the same thought 120 years earlier, when he finally sat down to pen the Origin of Species. If nature, as the poet Tennyson had put it, was always "red in tooth and claw", how could one explain benevolence and sacrifice? The persistence over evolutionary time of behaviors that reduce fitness seemed an utter paradox if evolution was nothing but a game of survival of the fitness. This was Darwin's great riddle, and ever since biologists and economists, philosophers and psychologists have all been trying to crack it.
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