Darwin had a problem or ‘special difficulty’ as he called it, with social insects like bees which have large populations of neuters of sexless females in their community. In The Origin of Species he wrote that their existence appeared to him to be “actually fatal” to the whole theory of evolution. These neuters he said “often differ widely in instinct and in structure from both the males and fertile females, and yet from being sterile, they cannot propagate their kind.” In the end he sort of got around the obstacle by believing the difficulty was lessened if (natural) selection could be applied to the extended family as well as to the individual.

Today the process is called kin selection and refers to the way in which genes often increase in frequency due to interactions between related individuals. In fact, there are many examples in nature where evolution can only stand validated if we consider how even distant biological relatives influence the fitness of another individual at a cost to themselves.

Vampire bats, for instance, regularly regurgitate blood and donate it to other members of their group who have failed to feed that night, ensuring they do not starve. This means that at the same time they deprive themselves of some food, which over a period of time would render them less fit and, therefore, less likely to have healthier off-spring and, ultimately, less likely to survive. Similarly, vervet monkeys give alarm calls to warn fellow monkeys of the presence of predators, even though in doing so they attract attention to themselves, increasing their personal chance of being killed.

It basically turns evolution on its head, unless we can think of such behaviour as being for the greater good of the flock, herd, tribe or community. Meaning, the enhanced fitness of relatives can at times more than compensate for the fitness loss incurred by the individuals displaying the behaviour. Some people have evoked kin selection to explain humanity’s social structure, as otherwise there could be no evolutionary gain out of creating civilizations where frequently a lot of individuals go out of their way to help others – sometimes even at peril to themselves. From this trend others have extrapolated that the logical conclusion of such evolutionary development would be religiosity and a sense of the divine. Which is why they say we possess the so-called “spiritual gene”.