Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality.

As part of a new emergence series, we're publishing a selection of essays from kinship, belonging in a world of relations.

A five-volume collection edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdorfer,

including this poignant essay from Richard Powers. Richard is the author of 12 novels, including the newly released Bewilderland and the Overstory,

winner of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

In this essay, he reflects on whether there is a genetic basis for altruism.

Richard arrived its story as the vehicle

through which human beings can find kinship

with other creatures.

Recognizing and remembering our shared narrative

in the urgent drama of this moment. Reflecting on a possible genetic basis for altruism,

the evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton once wrote,

that in the world of our model organisms, everyone would sacrifice his own life when he can thereby save more than two brothers or four half-brothers, or eight first cousins.

A similar quip is often attributed to JBS Hall-Dane,

one of history's most quotable scientists,

although Haldane never wrote it down.

The arithmetical precision of Hamilton's formula gives it an almost comical ring, and the line sounds

at least a little tongue-in-cheek.

But Hamilton, one of the progenitors of the theory of kin selection, took the meme seriously

...