Can we save Binghamton, NY with evolutionary theory?

I'm at the Psychoneuroimmunology conference a little bit outside Chicago right now. It's been the first full day, 11 hours of lectures and catching up with old friends about their research/ lives. There's been some fascinating talks, a few highlights have been Steven Maier's talk about the PNI of stress, Jonathan Kipnis's talk about T-cell modulation of cognition, and a very inspiring lecture from Ginny Sanders. It's always nice to be reminded of why I love research. The people I admire the most are the people that seem to get better with age. They seem to gain energy rather than having it slowly drain away. I hope that I will continue to be one of the lucky ones.

David Sloan Wilson seems to be one of those scientists who sees the power of theory to change the way the world works (or at least he's trying). This article in Nature caught my eye, mostly because it's about my old undergraduate home. According to a 2011 Gallup pole, Binghamton, NY is one of the top 5 cities that is most disliked by its own residents. No surprise there; the place is strikingly horrible. Crime is high, the weather is bad, and everyone hates each other... no exaggeration.

"Wilson, who works at the State University of New York in Binghamton, has been a prominent figure in evolutionary biology since the 1970s. Much of his research has focused on the long-standing puzzle of altruism — why organisms sometimes do things for others at a cost to themselves. Altruism lowers an individual's chances of passing its own genetic material on to the next generation, yet persists in organisms from slime moulds to humans. Wilson has championed a controversial idea that natural selection occurs at multiple levels: acting not only on genes and individuals, but also on entire groups. Groups with high prosociality — a suite of cooperative behaviours that includes altruism — often outcompete those that have little social cohesion, so natural selection applies to group behaviours just as it does on individual adaptations¹. Many contend that group-level selection is not needed to explain altruism, but Wilson believes that it is this process that has made humans a profoundly social species, the bees of the primate order."

Wilson believes that by creating policies that "select for prosociality", he can enhance the evolutionary fitness of Binghamton and aid it's survival. Interesting idea. It's clear from the article that the authors sort of think he's nuts. It's also obvious that although Wilson's ideas are informed by evolutionary theories, the things he's doing are in general are NOT science. But maybe he's on to something. Check it out.