590. Individual and group selection

Some ant colonies have workers, of great benefit to the colony, nursing the queen and clearing refuse, but they are sterile. This raises a puzzle: how can the arrangement with sterile ants endure if the latter are sterile? This puzzle greatly worried Darwin, who feared it contradicted his theory of evolution, where traits are transmitted with DNA.

 His solution was as follows: if ordinary, non-sterile ants in their DNA have the ability to bear sterile workers, their community endures. Worker ants ar favourable to the group, but groups do not have genes. An alternative to the given explanation is cultural transmission, where favourable traits are transmitted in education and schooling.

 A similar puzzle arises concerning trustworthiness. It is favourable to the group if people are altruistic to some extent, but a trusting society is vulnerable to the entry of egotists who prey on the trusters. One needs a sufficient number of defenders who can identify the egotistic entrants and stop them, even if this is to the detriment of their own, personal, survival, and have it in their DNA to do so. Cultural transmission may help, but is also conceivable that normal members of the community bear such community-minded defenders in sufficient numbers.