“One Nation, Indivisible” features excerpts from The Sun’s archives that speak to the current political moment.
— Ed.
For a while we thought what distinguished humans from other animals is reciprocal altruism: when an individual acts in the best interest of a group or of the species in general, even though that individual doesn’t directly benefit. Obviously we will protect ourselves and our home and family, but we’ll also go to war to fight for an enormous abstraction called our culture. When a young man leaves his home and goes to the other side of the world to fight an enemy and gets killed, that’s reciprocal altruism in the extreme. We thought there were no other animals who do that, but, guess what: there are. For example, Susan Lingle in Canada discovered that mule deer exercise reciprocal altruism. She was putting radio collars on newborn fawns to study their movements, and some of these fawns, when captured, would make a loud, bleating cry. In response to the cry, here would come a mama mule deer with an attitude. Lingle wondered whether does would differentiate between their own fawn and another baby deer. So she recorded the cries and played them back through speakers hidden in the wild. She found that a mother mule deer would abandon her fawns to go fight the mountain lion or bear or whatever might be threatening the unseen fawn whose cries she had heard. That doe was risking her life, and thereby her offspring’s lives, to save another doe’s fawn.
