THE FALLACY OF GROUP SELECTION In evolutionary biology discussions of altruism

tic, and itself as committed to freedom. This is paradoxical, because sociology has emphasized social conditioning in much the same way that academic psychology used to believe in behaviourist conditioning. Just as Pavlov’s dogs were individually conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell, so sociologists have tended to teach that human beings are socially conditioned. One of the founders of modern sociology, Émile Durkheim (1857-1917), claimed that all ‘social facts’ had social causes irreducible to other factors. He even believed that suicide was a social fact and that social causes had a coercive effect on individual behaviour. Like the behaviourist psychologist who regarded the organism as a clean slate on which anything could be written by the appropriate conditioning, Durkheim saw the individual mind as an empty field until filled and given form by a ‘collective consciousness’. This came about through a process that today would be called socialization — the moulding of the individual by Society. The most extreme expression of this was ‘altruistic’ suicide, where individuals counted their own lives as nothing compared to that of the group on whose behalf they sacrificed themselves.