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Authors: Oren Harman
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a single equation. It was a dramatic flash—a penetration that would forever change our view of the evolution of life. Unknown, untrained, in a foreign country, dejected and alone, he had caught a glimpse of the great canvas of natural selection and seen its splendor and broadness. And, writing the elegant equation, he literally came off the street, anonymous, to present it to the world.
But if George Price’s mathematics helped penetrate the origins of altruism deeper than ever before, his life itself was an attempt to answer its most burdensome and mystifying riddle. The level at which selection operates is a technical issue but bears heavily on a fundamental conundrum: If altruism evolved over time in nature, it surely must have served some utilitarian purpose, and if it serves an ulterior purpose it is never what it seems. Part of some natural metric, the purity of selflessness is undermined by the scourge of self-interest: What looks like sacrifice may in fact be the road to personal gain. And so, when it comes to us, a dreaded question arises: Beneath its evolutionary veneer, and despite the refinements of culture, does true selfless altruism exist? It’s a question every human since Adam and Eve has sought desperately to answer.
It is a question, too, that modern scientists tackled fearlessly. Whether they ever succeed entirely is doubtful: The problems science is equipped to answer, we shall see, are fundamentally of a different kind. George Price’s life, on the other hand, provides a precious and original counterpoint. From the depths of the Great Depression in New York City to Swinging London in the sixties, and from the glamour of secrecy at the Manhattan Project to the humiliation of homelessness off Soho Square, it traces a dramatic trajectory. From militant atheism to religious ecstasy; from comfort and respectability to self-imposed vagrancy; from selfishness to selflessness and finally to the depths of anguish and suicide—George Price’s life, like the grander tale of attempts to crack the mystery of altruism, is a powerful reminder of the inescapable duel between biological necessity and the transcendence of the human spirit. But if ultimately, just like science, it too fails to provide a full answer to the mystery of kindness, it illuminates, more clearly than ever before, the meaning of the mystery.
This is the timeless story of the search for the origins of kindness. It is a tale of animal and man, of nature and politics, of true goodness and deceptive appearances. Its characters are many and colorful: the Russian anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin; the “Devil’s disciple” Thomas Henry Huxley; the Hungarian-born mathematical wizard and father of game theory, John von Neumann; the English polymath and “last man to know all there is to know” J. B. S. Haldane; the “Orwellian” psychologist B. F. Skinner; the father of information theory, Claude Shannon; “the most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin,” Bill Hamilton; John D. Rockefeller, Vladimir Ilych Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, the Beatles, and many more.
But more than a personal history of men, this is also a collective chronicle of humanity. From its lowly beginnings in some primordial soup through slime mold to ant to antlered deer to inquisitive monkey, the story of the search for goodness climbs all the way from the oceans and the jungles to titanic twentieth-century battles between systems of government and economics. From the promise of democracy and the free market to communism and the hope of equality, and from the liberations and perils of individualism to the inebriation of nationalism and unity, the quest to crack the altruism code traces an epic voyage. From baboons fighting in trees, to the Russian Revolution, to Nazi Germany, to the atom bomb, to twenty-first-century neurogenetics and brain imaging today, it is mankind’s soaring, Sisyphean journey to return to the paradise of the
But if George Price’s mathematics helped penetrate the origins of altruism deeper than ever before, his life itself was an attempt to answer its most burdensome and mystifying riddle. The level at which selection operates is a technical issue but bears heavily on a fundamental conundrum: If altruism evolved over time in nature, it surely must have served some utilitarian purpose, and if it serves an ulterior purpose it is never what it seems. Part of some natural metric, the purity of selflessness is undermined by the scourge of self-interest: What looks like sacrifice may in fact be the road to personal gain. And so, when it comes to us, a dreaded question arises: Beneath its evolutionary veneer, and despite the refinements of culture, does true selfless altruism exist? It’s a question every human since Adam and Eve has sought desperately to answer.
It is a question, too, that modern scientists tackled fearlessly. Whether they ever succeed entirely is doubtful: The problems science is equipped to answer, we shall see, are fundamentally of a different kind. George Price’s life, on the other hand, provides a precious and original counterpoint. From the depths of the Great Depression in New York City to Swinging London in the sixties, and from the glamour of secrecy at the Manhattan Project to the humiliation of homelessness off Soho Square, it traces a dramatic trajectory. From militant atheism to religious ecstasy; from comfort and respectability to self-imposed vagrancy; from selfishness to selflessness and finally to the depths of anguish and suicide—George Price’s life, like the grander tale of attempts to crack the mystery of altruism, is a powerful reminder of the inescapable duel between biological necessity and the transcendence of the human spirit. But if ultimately, just like science, it too fails to provide a full answer to the mystery of kindness, it illuminates, more clearly than ever before, the meaning of the mystery.
This is the timeless story of the search for the origins of kindness. It is a tale of animal and man, of nature and politics, of true goodness and deceptive appearances. Its characters are many and colorful: the Russian anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin; the “Devil’s disciple” Thomas Henry Huxley; the Hungarian-born mathematical wizard and father of game theory, John von Neumann; the English polymath and “last man to know all there is to know” J. B. S. Haldane; the “Orwellian” psychologist B. F. Skinner; the father of information theory, Claude Shannon; “the most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin,” Bill Hamilton; John D. Rockefeller, Vladimir Ilych Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, the Beatles, and many more.
But more than a personal history of men, this is also a collective chronicle of humanity. From its lowly beginnings in some primordial soup through slime mold to ant to antlered deer to inquisitive monkey, the story of the search for goodness climbs all the way from the oceans and the jungles to titanic twentieth-century battles between systems of government and economics. From the promise of democracy and the free market to communism and the hope of equality, and from the liberations and perils of individualism to the inebriation of nationalism and unity, the quest to crack the altruism code traces an epic voyage. From baboons fighting in trees, to the Russian Revolution, to Nazi Germany, to the atom bomb, to twenty-first-century neurogenetics and brain imaging today, it is mankind’s soaring, Sisyphean journey to return to the paradise of the
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