So the full sentence is related to an anecdotal story of a geneticist John Haldane way back when while we were just trying to figure our genome out and it goes: “I would gladly give up my life for two brothers or eight cousins” – meaning that, in the pure cold mathematical sense if you’re just concerned with passing on copies of your genes, two brothers are likely to have all of your genes and you’d get a full lot of them with eight cousins.

It’s a witty quip used to demonstrate the laws of genetic inheritance pertaining to the long term cost benefit analyses of any given behaviour, in strictly cold math of course. So as Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky laid out in his behavioural evolution class, there was this long held misconception that a lot of animal behaviour can be described in a way altruistically as a sacrifice for the benefit of a group. V. C. Wynne-Edwards, an English zoologist, believed that natural selection acts at a group level and appropriately called his theory group selection. This is in fact not true as animals behave in a way to maximise the continuation of their genes. It’s not a group thing, more as a “family” cosa nostra kind of thing. Social animals can shame even us in keeping track of kinships, favours and reciprocal behaviours. Nature views thigs far more into the future than we do so we were wrong at first – the survival of the fittest theory of natural selection is has an annex – reproduction of the fittest. Basically, an organism will do what it can to maximize the number of its own dynasty. It sometimes may look like altruism but it is “calculated”.

There are a few ways to Xerox your genes. First is to reproduce yourself and, as we know, the ones that get to reproduce are not necessarily the strongest of the bunch but those most able to adapt to changing circumstances. Yet, even Darwin knew that there are forces pulling in opposite direction and that sexual selection can sometimes go against the natural selection – a female may prefer more brightly coloured feathers on a male, but the brighter the feathers the more likely he is to be spotted by a predator and taken out of the gene pool, but you’ve had more opportunity to reproduce because the girls like your feathers. Second is the fact that evolution favours organisms that cooperate with their relatives aka kin selection where Haldane’s funny remark lands. Animals can keep track of levels of kinship to staggering amount even to the point of time delayed vendettas once removed in the kin tree. A phenomenon is rarely just one thing at a time and nature has quite a few ricks up her sleeve. She’s not that concerned with comfort, stagnation and past, (outside of being conservative of the traits that showed to be successful) and is always keeping one eye on balance and the other on the future. So it’s not uncommon to find stale mates in coevolution of species, as Sapolsky called it, a rock, paper scissors situation, where a few types of organisms have developed a sort of a Mexican standoff type of truce and cooperation, because any kind of aggressive behaviour starts a cascade resulting in their own demise or loss of resources. So, in the best interest of all, they work together to maximise their own chances although they are not related. Cooperation and stale mates are so deeply seeded that even bacteria engage in it. In higher animals there is also a sort of reciprocal altruism aka you’ll cooperate but not give more than you get.

So it’s basically not only about me, myself and I, not only about giving up your life (resources, time, mating opportunity) in favour of two brothers or eight cousins. It’s all of these things plus neighbours, communities, common interests (such as not dying), reciprocity, natural vs. sexual selection, circumstance, coincidence and inevitability, genetics and epigenetics… a wonderful dance off all things alive, competing and cooperating, as the same life force manifests itself in an ant, starfish or a human. Have respect for all things alive. There’s been a long journey for them (and you) to be here at all and, removed from the sterile (pun intended) math, we’re all brothers in a way.