How many degrees to yourself?

Count the many gatherings you attended during the holidays and you will see that many of those groups are made up of people who are not genetically related to you. While sharing gifts, food, stories, advice with office friends, former classmates, childhood playmates, sports mates and whatever other group you have, is the most natural thing for you to do during the season, it gets anthropologists like University of California’s Robert Boyd excited to know why we cooperate with groups who are not our family. And this cooperation happens beyond the holiday season. Scientists ask this because we are the only species who have been able to form such an elaborate scheme of cultures and civilizations that have within them groups that foster cooperation. If you have not noticed yet, the lucky primates who still have forests to roam in, do not form their own Gawad Kalinga to take care of other primates who have run out of forests to live in. Sharks who are left to die after their fins have been cut for Chinese soup do not join the World Wildlife Fund to shame us on the brutal consequences of satisfying our boundless human appetite preying on their species at large.

This kind of cooperation mentioned above, beyond the more obvious reason of "they’re family," is what Robert Boyd in his study published in the journal Science in the Dec. 8, 2006 issue, tried to examine. Why do we help those who are not family? Some religions will offer answers in the form of a belief in the innate goodness of humans based on authoritative ancient text. But science thinks there is no one simple answer to that question because the complete answer to what makes us human does not lie in one issue of a science journal, least of all in this science column. I am also worried about what it will do to our collective self-esteem if we find out that what makes us human was on pages 1555 to 1556 of a science journal last month and we missed it. But science, in its unshakable giddiness to ask, is always offering possible answers, not out of ice cream castles but out of evidence.

Robert Boyd offered evidence that the groups we form may be related far more than we first thought. In data he examined from a hunter-gatherer group, the members turned out to be related closer than once thought – "a bit below that of cousins" is how it was phrased in the journal Science. In the context of Philippine society, this could play out so well. Krip Yuson, a fellow STAR columnist, told me a theory that says that a Filipino is only 1.5 degrees separated from the next fellow. This is four times less than six degrees, a.k.a "six degrees of separation" – the idea that has been around for a while now, and seemed to have originated in the mind of a Hungarian named Frigyes Karinthy in 1929. Karinthy thought that human networks are growing at such a pace that it takes at most five individuals in between to connect one individual to another. I still have to figure out how Krip’s ".5" degree would translate as a "relation" although perhaps "by law" in terms of "adoption" or "marriage." Krip told me that during the launch of the silver issue of Caracoa 2006, the Philippine poetry journal, at Mag-net Café last Dec 22. I could not help but worry about the genetic proximity I have with the young man who read poetry on stage while brushing his teeth.

Boyd also found out that since "groups" compete with one another in society, the "successful" groups are able to take over the niches that once "extinct" groups had, increasing the rewards of cooperation. Most interesting to me was that Boyd thinks that food sharing and other cultural practices sort of levels the field for all the members of the group, making the members feel that cooperating does not cost them more than it benefits them. To anthropologists, these all figure in the evolutionary equation – we work together in groups because it helps us survive.

These all tie neatly for the hunter-gatherer groups who were in Boyd’s study and probably even for our holiday groups and civil society groups. But remember that study I wrote about last December (De Rerum Natura: "The Mere Idea of Money") that had people becoming selfish and uncooperative when money is subliminally introduced in the scenario? If one reason that people join and cooperate in groups is because the costs of cooperating are less than the benefits, what does it take for the idea of "cost" (no matter how small) to morph into the shape of a buck, that according to that study will make group members go on their own and become selfish? Having demonstrated in studies that the mere idea of money (not real money) drives us nuts and makes us forget everything that our mothers have taught us about sharing, how do we now look at ourselves and our prospects of helping one another in groups?

If I examine why I hang out with the kind of people I hang out with and use Boyd’s anthropological ruler, those groups and I, by that anthropological measure, are soon to go extinct. In other words, anthropologically speaking, we are "losers." A lot of the people I love and the groups I resonate with are not genetically related to each other or to me though they, of course, insist that they are, in the cosmic sense and all. They also do not consciously take over any niches left over by a group that has dropped by the gutters of the evolutionary highway or rush to reap the harvests there. My nutty friends in the sciences and the arts usually carve their own places under the sun in their own time, and often even make comfortable nests along evolution’s gutters.

Anthropology sometimes has a way of making us see our journey to becoming human as some sort of genetic investment in futures, or like stock options that our kind cashes in on eventually down the line in terms of genetic enrichment and suitability. The study never claimed that it is the one and only answer to why humans cooperate but it sure lent that business channel flavor to my understanding of what it means to be a cooperative human. If I put aside the anthropological lens I just used for this column, I think and feel that I cooperate with groups I resonate with because those groups are where I stake parts of myself – to find out who I am and what I am made of. Sort of a paradox – I have to travel through degrees in order to arrive at the beginning – a life-long journey from and to the shore of myself. Mea Arripa.

* * *

For comments, e-mail [email protected]