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Authors: Oren Harman
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second edition of The Origin of Species after leaving him out of the first, virtue was no kind of human invention. More ancient than the Bible, still earlier than philosophy, morality was in fact older than Adam and Eve. 6
Why do amoebas build stalks from their own bodies, sacrificing themselves in the process, so that some may climb up and be carried away from dearth to plenty on the legs of an innocent insect or the wings of a felicitous wind? Why do vampire bats share blood, mouth to mouth, at the end of a night of prey with members of the colony who were less successful in the hunt? Why do sentry gazelles jump up and down when a lion is spotted, putting themselves precariously between the herd and hungry hunter? And what do all of these have to do with morality in humans: Is there, in fact, a natural origin to our acts of kindness? Does the virtue of amoebas and bats and gazelles and humans come from the very same place?
Altruism was a puzzle. It stood blatantly opposed to the fundamentals of the theory, an anomalous thorn in Darwin’s side. If Nature was bloody in tooth and claw, a ruthless battle fiercely fought beneath the waves and through the skies and in the deserts and the jungles, how could a behavior that lowered fitness be selected? Survival of the fittest or survival of the nicest: It was a conundrum the Darwinians would need to solve.
And so, starting with Darwin, the quest to solve the mystery of altruism began. It traveled far and wide: From the Beagle in the southern seas to the court of the Russian czar Alexander II to the chambers of London’s Royal Society; from economics lecture halls at the University of Chicago to Senate hearing rooms on Capitol Hill; from Indiana prairies to Brazilian jungles to Jamaican mountains; from World War I trenches to anti–Vietnam War demonstrations, Marxist manifestos to Anglican proclamations, Quaker pacifications to Nazi heresies. Some argued that man was all of a part with Nature, bound by his animal beginnings, others that his intelligence rendered him uniquely transcendent. Some championed a return to origins, others the clawing climb of culture away from them, still others an uneasy marriage between the two. Emphatic and zealous, each saw the problem from where they were standing, sometimes translating prior commitments about what’s right and wrong directly onto nature. And so the quest remained far from complete. As we shall see, 150 years after Darwin it continues just as passionately.
But if the search for the natural origins of goodness has woven a historical tapestry of unusual complexity and color, of strikingly original science and dramatic personalities and events, one important thread has so far been missing. It is the thread of the unique life and tragic death of the forgotten American genius George Price, atheist-chemist and drifter turned religious evolutionary–mathematician and derelict, the man who rests in an unmarked grave in Saint Pancras Cemetery to this very day. Some of the greatest scientific minds of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have grappled with the reality of true selflessness, from economics to biology, mathematics to philosophy, ecology to theology to genetics. In the face of the difficult odds posed by egoism, they found it far from an easy problem to crack. Then, like a phantom, came George.
As the thread of George Price’s life is woven into the tapestry of the search for the origins of altruism for the very first time, 7 the colors of the pageant suddenly change in radiance and hue. For using Darwin’s great insight to penetrate the mystery of kindness, Price came to see what had eluded many before him: Whereas others, in their hunt to fathom goodness, pitted different levels of organization of life against one another—the gene conniving against the individual, the individual subverting the group, one group fighting doggedly against another—this lonely outsider understood that they would all have to be part of
Why do amoebas build stalks from their own bodies, sacrificing themselves in the process, so that some may climb up and be carried away from dearth to plenty on the legs of an innocent insect or the wings of a felicitous wind? Why do vampire bats share blood, mouth to mouth, at the end of a night of prey with members of the colony who were less successful in the hunt? Why do sentry gazelles jump up and down when a lion is spotted, putting themselves precariously between the herd and hungry hunter? And what do all of these have to do with morality in humans: Is there, in fact, a natural origin to our acts of kindness? Does the virtue of amoebas and bats and gazelles and humans come from the very same place?
Altruism was a puzzle. It stood blatantly opposed to the fundamentals of the theory, an anomalous thorn in Darwin’s side. If Nature was bloody in tooth and claw, a ruthless battle fiercely fought beneath the waves and through the skies and in the deserts and the jungles, how could a behavior that lowered fitness be selected? Survival of the fittest or survival of the nicest: It was a conundrum the Darwinians would need to solve.
And so, starting with Darwin, the quest to solve the mystery of altruism began. It traveled far and wide: From the Beagle in the southern seas to the court of the Russian czar Alexander II to the chambers of London’s Royal Society; from economics lecture halls at the University of Chicago to Senate hearing rooms on Capitol Hill; from Indiana prairies to Brazilian jungles to Jamaican mountains; from World War I trenches to anti–Vietnam War demonstrations, Marxist manifestos to Anglican proclamations, Quaker pacifications to Nazi heresies. Some argued that man was all of a part with Nature, bound by his animal beginnings, others that his intelligence rendered him uniquely transcendent. Some championed a return to origins, others the clawing climb of culture away from them, still others an uneasy marriage between the two. Emphatic and zealous, each saw the problem from where they were standing, sometimes translating prior commitments about what’s right and wrong directly onto nature. And so the quest remained far from complete. As we shall see, 150 years after Darwin it continues just as passionately.
But if the search for the natural origins of goodness has woven a historical tapestry of unusual complexity and color, of strikingly original science and dramatic personalities and events, one important thread has so far been missing. It is the thread of the unique life and tragic death of the forgotten American genius George Price, atheist-chemist and drifter turned religious evolutionary–mathematician and derelict, the man who rests in an unmarked grave in Saint Pancras Cemetery to this very day. Some of the greatest scientific minds of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have grappled with the reality of true selflessness, from economics to biology, mathematics to philosophy, ecology to theology to genetics. In the face of the difficult odds posed by egoism, they found it far from an easy problem to crack. Then, like a phantom, came George.
As the thread of George Price’s life is woven into the tapestry of the search for the origins of altruism for the very first time, 7 the colors of the pageant suddenly change in radiance and hue. For using Darwin’s great insight to penetrate the mystery of kindness, Price came to see what had eluded many before him: Whereas others, in their hunt to fathom goodness, pitted different levels of organization of life against one another—the gene conniving against the individual, the individual subverting the group, one group fighting doggedly against another—this lonely outsider understood that they would all have to be part of
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