The trait I admire most in a fellow thinker is the ability to entertain an idea without necessarily swallowing it whole. With that in mind, I eagerly listened to E.O. Wilson’s On the Shoulders of Giants address at the World Science Festival in New York City. I recently wrote about Wilson and his controversial rethink of altruism on this blog. In short, Wilson has abandoned his long-held belief that cooperative and altruistic behavior among organisms can be explained simply as a kind of veiled selfishness, a theory known as inclusive fitness. It holds that when an organism behaves “altruistically” by sacrificing itself or putting itself in danger, it is not driven by romantic notions of valor but rather by individual genes jockeying to survive by passing on identical copies to offspring. After years of championing inclusive fitness, E.O. Wilson has jettisoned it for a different theory, the controversial concept of “group selection.” This is the idea that genes for altruism persist by benefiting the entire group. Here, altruistic traits persist by helping groups multiply and grow into larger and larger networks with more and more biomass. This all happens despite the fact that the altruistic trait is detrimental to the …