by Hope Jahren
When I spoke to Roger Atkinson, of the WMO, he stressed that asperitas would merely be “a fourth-order classification, not a primary genus, not one of the primary cloud types, not one of the Big Nine.” Neither was it the only new classification the task team recommended adding; it was just the most famous one. The prominence of the cloud seems to have forced the scientists’ hand. Asperitas didn’t appear to have any operational significance, but the public enthusiasm Pretor-Pinney had gathered around the cloud ultimately made asperitas too prominent to ignore. One task-team member, George Anderson, told me that not giving such a well-known cloud a definitive name would only create more confusion.
Pretor-Pinney conceded all this, happily. “My argument is not that this is some hugely significant thing,” he told me. By now he was mostly using the cloud to make a point—to needle the “human vanity” inherent in “the Victorian urge to classify things, to put them into pigeonholes and give them scientific names.” Clouds, he added, “are ephemeral, ever-changing, phenomenal. Here you have a discrete, scientific, analytic urge laid onto the embodiment of chaos, onto these formations within these unbounded pockets of our atmosphere where there’s no beginning and no edge.” All he wanted was to encourage people to look at the sky, to elevate our perception of clouds as beautiful “for their own sake.”
Slowly, over the last 200 years, the impulse of cloud lovers like Howard and Abercromby to make the mystical empirical had ossified into something stringent and reductive. Pretor-Pinney wanted to clear a little more space in our collective cloudscape for less distinct feelings of delight and wonder. His championing of asperatus was in reality somewhat arbitrary. There were a few other unnamed cloud forms he saw repeating in the society’s photo gallery. He just happened to pick this one.
The cultural history of clouds seemed to be shaped by a procession of amateurs, each of whom projected the ethos of his particular era onto those billowing blank slates in the troposphere. Pretor-Pinney was our era’s, I realized—the Internet era’s. He wasn’t just challenging the cloud authorities with his crowdsourced cloud; he was trolling them.
I was one of the many reporters who contacted Pretor-Pinney when the first photos of asperitas made the rounds in 2009. I had seen an Associated Press article, with Jane Wiggins’s photo of the cloud in Iowa and a reference to Pretor-Pinney and his Cloud Appreciation Society, and felt a kind of instant and exhilarated envy: apparently some people cultivated a meaningful connection to what I’d only ever regarded as vaporous arrangements of nothingness. I wanted in. Also, I was impressed that these enthusiasts seemed to be rattling the self-serious strictures of the scientific establishment. And so it was disappointing to realize that nothing was really happening yet and that no one seemed particularly rattled.
Eventually Pretor-Pinney even sounded slightly exhausted by asperitas. “It’s the zombie news story that will never die!” he said. He was by then closing in on his 10th year as head of the Cloud Appreciation Society, and as he’d done after 10 years with The Idler magazine, he was questioning his commitment to it. Somehow being a cloud impresario had swallowed an enormous amount of time. He was lecturing about clouds around the world, sharing stages at corporate conferences and ideas festivals with Snoop Dogg and Bill Clinton and appearing monthly on the Weather Channel. Then there was the Cloud Appreciation Society’s online store, a curated collection of society-branded merchandise and cloud-themed home goods, which turned out to be surprisingly demanding, particularly in the frenzied weeks before Christmas. The Cloud Appreciation Society was basically just Pretor-Pinney and his wife, Liz, plus a friend who oversaw the shop part-time and a retired steelworker he brought on to moderate the photo gallery. It was all arduous, which Pretor-Pinney seemed to find a little embarrassing. “My argument about why cloud-spotting is a worthwhile activity is that it’s an aimless activity,” he said. “And I’ve turned it into something that is very purposeful, that is work.”
At the same time he realized that he’d conjured a genuine community of amateur cloud-lovers from all over the world but regretted never doing anything to truly nourish it; it felt so “fluffy,” he said, “with no center to it, like a cloud.” Soon that spectral society—that cloud of people on the Internet—would be celebrating its 10th anniversary. “I’m thinking that it might be a nice reason to get everyone together,” he said.
One morning last September, Pretor-Pinney was fidgeting and fretting in the auditorium of the Royal Geographical Society building, at the edge of Kensington Gardens in London. “Escape to the Clouds,” a one-day conference to celebrate the Cloud Appreciation Society’s 10th anniversary, would be underway in 90 minutes, and Pretor-Pinney was impatiently supervising the small team of balloon-installation artists he had commissioned to rig inflatable cloud formations around the stage. This was the first big event that he organized for the Cloud Appreciation Society. The evening before the conference, he was expecting 315 attendees. But there was a late surge of ticket-buying, and now he was panicking about running out of artisanal Cloud-Nine Marshmallows for the gift bags. Outside, Pretor-Pinney kept pointing out, the London sky was impeccably blue. Not a single cloud. It was terrible.
Bounding onstage to kick off the conference, Pretor-Pinney seemed overwhelmed but cheerful. He reminded the muddle of cloud appreciators from all over the world, now crammed into the theater, that “to tune into the clouds is to slow down. It’s a moment of meteorological meditation.” And he celebrated the transcendence of cloud-spotting: how it connects us to the weather, the atmosphere, to one another. “We are part of the air,” he told everyone. “We don’t live beneath the sky. We live within the sky.”
Who were they all? Why were they there? They were a collection of ordinary people with an interest in clouds. Behind all those usernames on the Cloud Society website were schoolteachers, skydivers, meteorologists, retired astronomy teachers, office workers, and artists. Many people had come alone, but conversations sparked easily. (“I’ve just seen the best cloud dress I’ve seen in my life,” a woman said on the stairway. A second woman turned and said, “Well, yours is quite lovely too.”) The atmosphere was comfortable and convivial and amplified by a kind of feedback loop of escalating relief, whereby people who arrived at a cloud conference not knowing what to expect recognized how normal and friendly everyone was and enjoyed themselves even more.
The program Pretor-Pinney had pulled together was a little highbrow but fun. A British author recounted the misadventures of the first meteorologist to make a high-altitude balloon ascent. An energetic literary historian surveyed “English Literary Views of the Sky.” Pretor-Pinney and a professor of physics tried to demonstrate a complicated atmospheric freezing process in a plastic bottle, but failed. And between the talks a musician named Lisa Knapp performed folk songs about wind and weather. She had saved the obvious crowd-pleaser for her final turn onstage: the melancholy Joni Mitchell classic “Both Sides, Now.”
There would be one more talk after Knapp finished, but it didn’t matter. This—the Joni Mitchell moment—was the conference’s transformative conclusion. Knapp had an extraordinary voice, Bjork-like but gentler, and performed the song alone, accompanying herself with only a delicate, monotonal Indian classical instrument resting in her lap, a kind of bellows, called a shruti box. It let out a mournful, otherworldly drone. After hours of lectures and uncertain socializing with strangers, something about this spare arrangement and the sorrowful lyrics felt so vulnerable that by the time Knapp finished the first lines—“Rows and floes of angel hair . . . I’ve looked at clouds that way”—she was singing into an exquisite silence.
The performance moved me. But it was more than that, and weirder. Maybe somewhere in this story about clouds and cloud lovers I’d found a compelling argument for staying open to varieties of beauty that we can’t quite categorize and, by extension, for respecting the human capacity to feel, as much as our ability to scrutinize the sources of those feelings. Whatever the case, as Knapp sang, I started to feel an
inexplicable rush of empathy for the people I met that day, the people sitting around me—all these others, living within the same sky. And I let my mind wander, wondering about their lives. What I felt, really, was awe: the awe that comes when you fully internalize that every stranger’s interior life is just as complicated as yours. It seemed very unlikely that a meeting of an online cloud society in a dark, windowless room could produce such a moment of genuine emotion, but there I was, in the middle of it. Just thinking about clouds, I guess, had turned a little transcendent, at least for me.
Then I heard the sniffle. It was very loud. With the room so transfixed, it easily cut through Knapp’s voice from a few rows behind me, and when I turned to look, I saw Pretor-Pinney’s wife fully in tears. Then the woman right next to me, she was crying too. And I heard others inhaling loudly, oddly, and got the impression there were more. Immediately afterward, out in the hall, the first person I walked past was bashfully apologizing to two others. It was so strange, she kept saying. She just didn’t know why she’d been crying.
A couple of days later I tried to describe it in an email to a friend: “Many people spontaneously cried, just releasing their tears like rain, and I realized that we are all human beings—that’s the truth . . . in all our different forms and sizes, we are expressions of the same basic currents, just like the clouds.” And when I read the email back, I was mortified by how fluffy and stoned it sounded, but still—even now—I can’t pretend it’s not true.
MICHAEL REGNIER
The Man Who Gave Himself Away
FROM Mosaic
Laura met George in the pages of Reader’s Digest. In just a couple of column inches, she read an abridged version of his biography and was instantly intrigued. In the 1960s, apparently, egotistical scientist George Price discovered an equation that explained the evolution of altruism, then overnight turned into an extreme altruist, giving away everything up to and including his life.
A theater director, Laura Farnworth recognized the dramatic potential of the story. It was a tragedy of Greek proportions—the revelation of his own equation forcing Price to look back on his selfish life and mend his ways, even though choosing to live selflessly would lead inexorably to his death. But as she delved into his life and science over the next five years, Farnworth discovered a lot more than a simple morality tale.
Born in New York in 1922, George Price realized pretty early on that he was destined for greatness. In a class full of smart kids he was one of the smartest, especially with numbers. He was in the chess club, obviously, and his mathematical brain was naturally drawn to science. Determining that there was no rational argument for God’s existence, he became a militant atheist too.
His PhD came from the University of Chicago for work he did on the Manhattan Project—having graduated in chemistry, he’d been recruited to find better ways to detect traces of toxic uranium in people’s bodies. Although it had been a top-secret project, young Price must have felt he was already part of world events. Obsessed with applying his brilliance to big problems, however, he struggled to find a job that satisfied him. Instead he pursued his big ideas outside work, and not only scientific ones: he wasn’t afraid of wading into public arguments with famous economists, and even sent his plans for world peace to the U.S. Senate. He didn’t understand why other people didn’t take up his ideas: the solutions seemed so obvious to him.
Domestic problems were a different matter. He’d met his wife, Julia, on the Manhattan Project, but as well as being a scientist she was a devout Roman Catholic. The marriage was hard-pressed to survive Price’s scathing views on religion, and after eight years and two daughters—Annamarie and Kathleen—they divorced. Fed up with his job, his life, and the distinct lack of recognition in America, Price cut his ties in 1967 and crossed the Atlantic to London, intent on making a great scientific discovery there. He felt he had just a few more years to make his mark, but as it turned out, he needed only one.
Price had set himself the “problem” of explaining why humans lived in families—particularly what fatherhood was for, scientifically speaking. This in turn led him to the question of how altruism had evolved, and it was while studying new theories around this topic that he derived what is now called the Price equation, almost by accident.
This is what it looked like:
wΔz=cov(wi,zi)
It captured the essence of evolution by natural selection in one simple formula. It describes how in a population of reproducing individuals, be they people, plants, or self-replicating robots, any trait (z) that increases fitness (w) will increase in the population with each new generation; if a trait decreases fitness, it will decrease. It’s a type of statistical relationship called covariance, and it was so elegant that Price couldn’t quite believe no one had stumbled across it before.
So in September 1968, this obscure middle-aged American scientist walked in off the street to the Galton Laboratory, the home of human genetics at University College London. No one there knew who he was—he had no credentials, held no academic position, and had no appointment. All he had was an equation. When he confidently proclaimed in his condescending, high-pitched voice that his equation could explain the evolution of altruism, they probably thought he was a crank. Nevertheless, when he walked out 90 minutes later, Price had a job and the keys to his own office.
He continued to hone his equation there, but at the same time began giving away his possessions. He would seek out the homeless in Soho Square or at the nearest railway stations, Euston and King’s Cross, and give them anything they asked for, from the money out of his pay packet right down to the clothes off his back. If they needed a place to sleep, he would invite them back to his flat indefinitely. Eventually he had given away so much that he became as destitute as the men he was helping. When the lease ran out on his flat, he took to squatting, moving often, somehow continuing to do research as well.
By the end of 1974, Price had given up everything. Sometime before dawn on January 6, 1975, in a squat not far from Euston, he killed himself.
Told like that, it seems obvious that everything was connected—he studied the concept of family because of the way he’d left his wife and daughters; his subsequent altruism was related to the equation he discovered; his suicide was a result of his extreme altruism. But as Farnworth discovered, nothing in Price’s story is that simple.
To understand the sequence of events in his life, she set about drawing up a timeline based on his letters (archived in the British Library), the 2010 biography of Price that had prompted that short piece in Reader’s Digest, and other sources.
Knowing more of the details changes the story. For example, despite the implication that he deserted his daughters, they never felt he had abandoned them. Kathleen’s attitude is that it was normal in the 1950s for children to stay with their mother after a breakup, plus their father had remained a part of their lives, taking them to museums, concerts, and the theater. Yes, they saw less of him when he had to move away for a new job, but in her late teens Kathleen spent some time in New York, not far from where Price was then living, and she has fond memories of long walks through the city together, his love of poetry and Shakespeare, and his insatiable intellectual curiosity.
In 1966, more than a decade after the divorce, Price needed an operation to remove a tumor that had been lurking in his thyroid for a few years. Fatefully, he asked an old friend to do the surgery, and while removing the entire thyroid gland cured the cancer, it had serious consequences for Price’s health. A nerve in his right shoulder was damaged in the operation, leaving him extremely bitter about his (former) friend’s “butchery” and without feeling in his arm and on one side of his face. In addition he had to take thyroxine pills to replace the hormones his thyroid used to make. On occasion Price would stop taking his pills and experience profound episodes of depression as a result.
On a more positive note, Price’s medical insurance paid out handsomely, and it was this money that funded his move to London. Far
from abandoning Annamarie and Kathleen, by then 19 and 18 years old, respectively, he stayed in touch, writing often. But conscious of his own mortality, he felt time was running out and that by moving away he would be able to focus on one brilliant, final piece of research.
It’s inconceivable that his choice of family as a topic was not bound up with his relationship with his children, but the evolution of social behavior—and of altruism in particular—was also one of the biggest scientific questions of the age. It was threatening to undermine Darwin’s whole theory of evolution by natural selection, which made it more than worthy of Price’s obsessive attention.
Altruism has always been a bit of a problem. Every altruist has their own motives, of course—some are emotional, responding to fellow humans in desperate straits, while others are more rational, thinking about the kind of society they’d like to live in and acting accordingly. Does that imply a level of self-interest? Even if it did, it shouldn’t undo the goodness of altruism, and yet people can be deeply suspicious of those who apparently willingly put others’ interests before their own. Selfless acts often attract accusations of hidden selfishness, suggesting they’re not really altruistic at all.