Johan Hoebeke
Biography
Johan Hoebeke was Research Director at the IBMC until his retirement in 2006. His Ph.D. was obtained at the Katholieke Universiteit of Leuven (Belgium). After five years teaching at the University of Kinshasa (DRC), he joined the company Janssen Pharmaceutica (Beerse, Belgium). Returning to an academic career, he first was senior researcher at the Vrije Universiteit of Brussels before joining the CNRS continuing his research in molecular immunology in Paris, Göteborg, Tours and finally Strasbourg. Since his retirement, he has resumed his interest in the history of evolutionary theories.
Summary
Although Darwin himself was aware of the importance of cooperative behaviour, as mentioned in his ‘Descent of Man’, this was completely forgotten by his social-darwinian successors although it continued to be proposed by ‘heterodox’ evolutionists. By the centenary of the ‘Origin of Species’ and the triumph of the synthesis between Darwinisms and genetics as exemplified in T. Dobzhansky’s third edition of his ‘Genetics and the Origin of Species’ (1958), cooperation was no more mentioned. The introduction of kin selection by W.D. Hamilton (1964), following J.B.S. Haldane’s studies on population genetics, the models of reciprocal altruisms proposed by W. Trivers (1971) and the application of game theory in behavioural evolution by J. Maynard-Smith (1973) concomitant with the theory of the origin of eukaryotes by the endosymbiotic theory of L. Margulis (1970) again brought cooperation as an evolutionary mechanism in the foreground. This overview will try to bridge the gap between Darwin’s insight and the reappearance of cooperation as a major factor of biological evolution.
