Altruism is defined as the belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others and any behavior of an animal that may be disadvantageous for the individual, but that benefits others of its species (Oxford Dictionaries, 2011). The term “altruism” was coined by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), a French philosopher and social reformer and the theory was espoused by Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), a Russian philosopher, as the 'law of mutual aid (Sociology Professor, 2011). The altruism theory was expanded upon by William Donald Hamilton with his genetical theory of social behavior, also known as the Theory of Kin Selection and Inclusive Fitness.
Hamilton used the behavior of bees to explain altruism. Bees exist and operate in a stringent social hierarchy. The workers are sterile, serving only to protect and fulfill the needs of their queen, rather than reproduce themselves. This was the focus of Hamilton’s theories of kin selection and inclusive fitness (Barash, 1977). Through his theory, Hamilton argues that an individual can oversee progress of his genes in two ways: through reproducing and overseeing the upbringing of his own offspring or, the altruistic individual can forego reproduction, and participate in the rearing of a relative’s offspring. Hamilton poses that in this incidence, many of the genes lie in common with the altruistic individual, thus propagating his genotype indirectly (Crawford, 1987).
Hamilton also presented a mathematical relationship to explain how bees operate. He argued that the degree to which an organism is related to another organism is in direct proportion to the altruism exhibited. Hamilton (1964) wrote: The social behavior of a species evolves in such a way that in each distinct behavior-evoking situation the individual will seem to value his neighbor’s fitness against his own according to the