Ever wonder why there are so many heroes out there in fantasy? It's because they're breeding.

Ever wonder why there are so many heroes out there in fantasy? It's because they're breeding.

The debate over whether altruism is evolutionarily useful goes back hundreds of years, and in fact predates Darwin's popularization of the notion of natural selection. The crux of the argument is this: if being an altruistic person means that you lose resources and sacrifice your own well-being for the sake of others, than in a strictly survival-of-the-fittest environment, you won't compete as well and the selfish bastards will take over. The classic counter-argument is that few if any animal species actually live in an environment where a strict Darwinian law holds true. In most animals, there's evidence for how altruism, even at the cost of one's own life, can still help propagate one's genes into the future. One classic example is the meerkat. Meerkats have a fascinating behaviour where one meerkat will stand guard for predators in an exposed location while other meerkats do important things. From years of observation, we know one fact for certain: the meerkat standing guard is more likely to get eaten. Logically, if there were no overall advantage to this behaviour, it would be bred out, because meerkats who get eaten produce less offspring than meerkats who don't get eaten. At any rate, altruism must be advantageous somehow, or at least not excessively disadvantageous, because otherwise, in theory, altruistic people wouldn't keep being born. The classic explanation is that dead altruists still propagate their genes by having protected or aided their siblings, who share and therefore pass on one half of one's own genes, or as the great scientist JBS Haldane famously put it, he wouldn't necessarily sacrifice his life for his brother, but he might for two brothers or eight cousins.

There's another explanation for altruism being evolutionarily advantageous, and that is that there's a more direct mechanism. Here's two papers on the subject.

A fair bit of work has gone into trying to experimentally prove that people find altruism and heroism attractive, and not too long ago, Geoffrey Miller wrote a long and thorough review of the topic. His paper describes much of the classic work on the topic, but in sum, here's his main thesis: bodies produce short-term desire, but personality produces long-term desire (or the concept so poorly understood in science known as "love"). Miller goes on to argue that the most powerfully attractive traits are kindness, bravery, honesty, integrity, and fidelity. Looking at that list, I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels that Miller is pretty much reading off a romantic's notion of chivalry; I'd swear that I heard the list being read in the voice of Dennis Quaid. On a purely pragmatic level, these are useful personality traits to have if you want to produce a smaller number of very fit offspring; whereas the rogue down the street who has a new partner every month may produce a large number of children, most of whom don't do very well, a supremely loving and reliable mother and father can be counted on to put a lot of effort into raising their smaller number of children, and those children are therefore likely to be very successful. The fact that both strategies exist is a testament to the fact that they both work. More and more, research has been demonstrating that while these virtues definitely need to be learned by a child, there's a are a number of genes which play a role in whether a child grows to be a heroic or villainous adult.

Of course, it's harder to be attracted to someone's morals than their body, because morals aren't so overtly on display. This may be one reason why so many societies have evolved concealing clothing; it levels the playing field and gives less attractive but more altruistic people a fairer chance. Courtship rituals are probably a big part of how morality is displayed to a prospective partner, but there's another way to display oneself: through overt acts of heroism. If you save someone's life or get them out of a dangerous situation, you've displayed some potentially very useful traits and abilities which onlookers might be driven to obtain for their own children. Consider how this applies to our games, where PCs might be out there rescuing  entire cities every week; from a certain point of view, they're performing a mating ritual every time.

Miller's paper goes into great detail about the theory behind this, but doesn't provide so much in the way of good evidence, and as scientists, it's always nice to have an experiment that supports a theory. This brings me to a paper by Moore and colleagues, published a little less than a year ago, with the wonderfully attention-grabbing title, Selflessness is Sexy. They tested this is a simple and elegant way. They created a series of cards giving a picture of a characters' face and a brief description of them -- a character sheet, in essence -- and described them as either enjoying a neutral activity or engaging in an altruistic activity. The paper gives the example of one character sheet for example, where the same character was described as either watching Torchwood (it was a British study) or volunteering helping children with behaviour problems. I actually think this may have been a small flaw in the study, because a number of the examples they give of neutral activities are traditionally geeky activities, such as playing video games, and anyone reading this column is likely to have more of an attraction to that than the general population. In any event, the cards then asked how attractive the character seemed for either a fling or for a longer-term relationship. In brief, they showed that participants rated altruistic characters as being much more attractive for longer-term relationships, i.e., the sort that are much more likely to produce children over time. They saw a larger effect size in women than in men, which I suppose bears out a number of stereotypes that I'd feel depressed if I started to discuss at length.

While human mating behaviours are incredibly complex and poorly understood, this sort of data supports the notion that most people are indeed attracted to selflessness, altruism, and other heroic traits, but that these traits are more attractive to people who are looking for a longer-term partner and less important for someone one's just looking for a bit of fun. I can't imagine that this is a shocking finding to most people, but it's still useful to have some empirical data on the subject. The implication is that we really are wired to want to produce children with caring, giving people, and that means that, over the course of generation, there really is a process of selectively breeding for heroes. Much as I can be critical of humanity much of the time, that actually does give me a little bit of hope. 

More than four years ago, Dr. Eris Lis, M.D., began writing a series of brilliant and informative posts on RPGs through the eyes of a medical professional, and this is the one that appeared here on May 31, 2014. Lis is a physician, gamer, and author of the Skirmisher Publishing LLC OGL sourcebook Insults & Injuries, which is also available for the Pathfinder RPG system.