THE SOCIAL INSTINCT

HOW COOPERATION SHAPED THE WORLD

Almost half a century since the publication of Richard Dawkins’s most famous work, The Selfish Gene, Nichola Raihani, a professor of Evolution and Behaviour at UCL, has written a riposte. Where Dawkins had proclaimed that ‘we are born selfish’, Raihani insists that her researches lead her to conclude that ‘togetherness is wired into us’. Indeed, human beings must cooperate to survive if our enormous brains are going to receive the large number of calories they require. Jon Turney reviewing The Social

Instinct on the Artsdesk enjoyed the book’s range: ‘We learn much along

the way about social insects, meercats and naked mole rats, human pregnancy and birth, the menopause and grandmothering, and mating habits.’ In the Dan Hitchens enjoyed the ‘memorable’ details from Raihani’s field work among cooperative communities of pied warblers and cleaner fish, among others. However, Hitchens found the book ‘bogged down’ by ‘Darwinitis’, by its ‘fairly rigid application of Darwinian logic’ and an insistence that all human behaviour should be interpreted in terms of how it helps us reproduce or survive. In an interview on the Royal Society of Biology website, Raihani stressed the biological imperative of cooperation: ‘We, as individuals, are actually massive collectives of genes, cooperating inside genomes and cells all working together.’