The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017

by Hope Jahren

  This wasn’t the problem for Darwinism. After all, humans have culture and religion and moral codes to live by—maybe our altruism was more to do with that than biology. Unfortunately, altruism was not only a human trait—it was everywhere. There were birds that nurtured other pairs’ fledglings, vampire bats that regurgitated blood for those who’d failed to feed in the night, monkeys that put themselves in danger by raising the alarm when a predator approached the rest of their troop.

  It was altruistic ants that posed a particular problem for Charles Darwin. Natural selection is often described as “survival of the fittest,” where fitness means how successful an individual is at reproducing. If one individual has a trait that gives them a fitness advantage, they will tend to have more offspring than the others; because the advantage is likely to be passed on to their offspring, that trait will then spread through the population. A fundamental part of this idea is that individuals are competing for the resources they need to reproduce, and fitness includes anything that helps an individual reproduce more than the competition.

  But as Darwin observed, ants and other social insects are not in competition. They are cooperative, to the extent that worker ants are sterile and so have literally zero fitness. They ought to be extinct, yet there they are in every generation, sacrificing their own reproductive ambitions to serve the fertile queen and her drones. Darwin suggested that competition between groups of ants—queen, drones, and workers together—might be driving natural selection in this case. What was good for a nest competing against other nests would then outweigh what was good for any individual ant.

  Group selection, as this idea was known, was not a very good solution, though. It didn’t explain how the cooperative behavior evolved in the first place. The first altruistic ant would have been at such a huge disadvantage compared to the rest of its group that it would never have got the chance to breed more altruistic ants. The same was true of humans—natural selection was intrinsically stacked against any altruistic individual surviving long enough to pass on their altruism.

  This left a rather embarrassing paradox: the evolution of altruism was impossible, yet clearly altruism had evolved. If the biologists couldn’t resolve this, would they have to throw out the whole idea of natural selection?

  Luckily, a young man called Bill Hamilton spared biology’s blushes with a slightly different solution in 1964. He proposed that altruism could have evolved within family groups—yes, an individual altruist would seem to be at a disadvantage, but that was not the whole picture, because other individuals who shared the same genes associated with altruism would all influence each other’s “inclusive fitness.”

  Discussions of human altruism are often framed in terms of someone drowning in a pond. Do you put your own life at risk to try and save them? If you do, that’s altruism. Hamilton’s idea, which became known as kin selection, acknowledged that compared to a selfish person who never got their feet wet, someone who went around jumping into ponds to save drowning people would be at a greater risk of dying before they managed to reproduce and pass their altruistic genes on to their children. However, if they happened to save a relative who shared the same genes, our altruist would have indirectly helped to get those genes passed on to the next generation after all. If the total benefit derived from having altruistic genes in the family, so to speak, was greater than the cost, then the evolution of altruism was no longer paradoxical.

  When George Price stumbled across Hamilton’s work in the Senate House Library in 1968, he was shocked. He was forced to confront the relationship between morality and family, the biological imperative he should have felt to sacrifice his selfish ambitions in favor of supporting his kin. He immediately set to work to challenge, even disprove, Hamilton’s theory. But he could only confirm it. Along the way he derived his equation of natural selection, which helped to prove that altruism was not selfless and moral but rather selfish and genetic.

  Laura Farnworth wanted to be a dancer when she grew up. When scoliosis put an end to dreams of ballet school she turned to theater instead, but like Price, her ambitions were stymied by poor health. In Farnworth’s case, ulcerative colitis and a subsequent MRSA infection put her out of action for four years just as she had started to make her mark as a theater director. In 2011, when she had at last started working again, the idea of making a play about Price was also, therefore, about putting herself back center-stage.

  Ambition was tempered with respect, however—rather than play up to the obvious version of his story, Farnworth wanted to “do right by George,” which meant digging deeper into the true meaning of his actions and his research. But, she admits, understanding the Price equation was a constant struggle: “It’s like juggling with three balls. I can juggle with two, but throw the third one at me and I drop it. I get two parts of the equation, but when I try and understand the third bit, I lose it.”

  Price added the third bit while employed at the Galton Lab. Here’s what the next version looked like:

  wΔz=cov(wi,zi)+E(wiΔzi)

  The new bit on the right-hand side accounts for any effects the trait in question might have on its own transmission—if it has properties that make it more likely to be passed on than other traits. Having this extra term opened up the process to allow for more than the simple story of “survival of the fittest”—this was where Hamilton’s ideas of inclusive fitness and kin selection could start to influence the course of evolution. It even allowed group selection more broadly; indeed, Price thought it meant natural selection could occur at many levels simultaneously. He wrote to Hamilton at once.

  In his memoirs, Hamilton isn’t sure when he and Price became friends; reading their letters 40 years later, Farnworth was able to see their friendship develop more clearly. Price had written first, within days of reading the papers on kin selection. Hamilton had replied politely enough, not suspecting what was to come, then had gone to Brazil on an extended field trip, so there was a gap in their correspondence of about a year. During this time, prompted by an offhand remark in Hamilton’s letter, Price had toyed with applying game theory to biology (this work, taken up and developed by other scientists, actually helped move evolutionary biology forward much more than his equation). But he’d also set about working to improve the math of the kin selection theory, making it “more transparent.” By the time Hamilton was contactable again, Price had derived the first version of his equation and got his job at University College London. But it was the extended version of the equation that he really wanted his new friend to see.

  Today some scientists will tell you that the Price equation is empty. It is like a footballer who, when asked how their team will win the next match, says they will score more goals than the other team. By trying to explain the game at its most fundamental level, say the critics, the equation explains and predicts nothing about why certain traits should increase or decrease fitness.

  In her own quest to crack its meaning, Farnworth went to ask three evolutionary biologists who think there is more to it than that. One told her it was “quite simple, really.” Another jumped up and started scribbling diagrams and equations on the whiteboard in his office. The third said, “None of us understands it really; it resonates in context.” For its supporters, the Price equation is the closest thing biology has to E=mc2. It is a fundamental expression of natural selection that can be used to clarify concepts, separate different components of selection, and compare more specific mathematical models of evolution.

  As for Hamilton, he was delighted with it from the moment he saw it. The Price equation was not, as Price had hinted to him, a new derivation or correction of his ideas. Instead it was “a strange new formalism that was applicable to every kind of natural selection.” Its strangeness came precisely because Price was not a biologist—instead of starting from the work of their scientific forebears, he had worked everything out for himself from first principles.

  “In doing so,” wrote Hamilton, “he had found himself on a new road and
amid startling landscapes.”

  In June 1970, just a few months after Hamilton had written to say how “enchanted” he was with the equation, Price had a profound religious experience (he refused to tell his friend the details, sensing that Hamilton would be as unbelieving of such things as Price himself would have been until that point). Depressed, apparently by his role in confirming that altruism had selfish origins—though it is just as likely that he had stopped taking his thyroxine pills again—he had become obsessed with coincidences in his life, not least the sheer improbability that he, who hadn’t known “a covariance from a coconut,” should have discovered that equation. All at once, despite a lifetime of hardline atheism, he became convinced that a higher power had been at work.

  The nearest church was All Souls, just above Regent Street in central London. He walked in and started praying. By the time he walked out again, he had given himself to Jesus.

  At first he brought the full weight of his intellect to bear on the Bible—he concluded that Easter week had taken 12 days, not eight, and was determined to persuade others of this truth, writing arguments as rigorous and detailed as his scientific research. Typical Price: start from first principles, take nobody else’s word for it, test it obsessively, and try to find your own way to the truth.

  Then, at the end of 1972, he had a second conversion. He had already decided to trust in Jesus completely. He’d stopped taking his thyroxine pills and by now his insurance money was starting to run out—but if Jesus wanted to save him, Jesus would find a way. Around Christmas he collapsed, close to death. A neighbor found him and he was rushed to hospital, where the doctors saved his life. For Price this was a sign that Jesus did want him to live, but also to change his ways and stop worrying about the length of Holy Week. He told Hamilton he had “sort of ‘encountered’ Jesus.” He had had a vision, in other words, and heard Jesus whisper, “Give to everyone who asks of you.”

  Not everyone approved. A friend advised him against trying to “out-God God,” while even the vicar at All Souls said giving money to down-and-outs was “seldom more than an easy way out for ourselves.” But Price carried on giving away his worldly possessions whatever the consequences. He would even give away the big aluminum cross he wore round his neck if someone asked for it. Giving had become a compulsion, an addiction.

  Farnworth turned to Isabel Valli at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, to analyze Price’s letters for clues to his mental state during this period. The meticulous detail in his letters suggested they were reliable accounts of events, but to Valli they were like a psychiatric interview. She got an insight into the way his thought processes were changing while he was in London. Linearity gradually gave way to circular thinking; he would go off on tangents, spiraling ever further away from what he was trying to say. There was a logic to it, but one that became harder for anyone else to follow.

  Price was probably experiencing psychotic delusions, paranoia, and hallucinations beyond his visions of Jesus, not to mention depression exacerbated by thyroid hormone deficiency. According to Valli, it is human nature when trying to make sense of delusions to construct explanations based on things already significant in our lives; for Price, those things were religion and altruism (and also marriage—he proposed to several women around this time, including suggesting to Julia that they get remarried; like the others, she declined).

  It’s not that his altruism was a symptom of mental illness, nor that his equation turned him into an altruist; it was just another part of his increasingly disordered life that he was trying to incorporate into a consistent worldview.

  For him, the most rational explanation available was that he had been chosen by God to discover the Price equation and to become an extreme altruist. He was happy to tell people about it, too—if he is remembered at all, one of the first things people tell you about him is that he ran through the corridors of University College London shouting that he had “a hotline to Jesus.” In some ways his life had become extremely complicated, but it was also much more simple to be willing to give up anything and everything and put all his faith in Jesus.

  Of course, that isn’t the end of the story. As Farnworth sees it, Price had a third conversion shortly before he died. He finally stopped helping others. He didn’t have much more to give by this point, it’s true, but he began to pay more attention to his own well-being. He had realized that he needed to help himself first if he was going to be any use to anyone else. Rebuilding his life from the bottom up was a daunting task, however. Despite getting a job as a cleaner at a bank, he knew he was struggling. He made an appointment to see a psychiatrist. But then, just days before his appointment, he killed himself.

  George Price was buried in an unmarked grave in St. Pancras Cemetery, a few miles north of central London. Bill Hamilton was at the funeral service, along with some of the homeless men Price had helped. Afterward Hamilton went to the squat where Price had been staying to collect any scientific papers he had been working on.

  “Although the house was awaiting demolition the electricity was still on: it mightn’t have been too freezing for George when he was there all alone over Christmas,” Hamilton wrote in his memoirs. “As I tidied what was worth taking into the suitcase, his dried blood crackled on the linoleum under my shoes: a basically tidy man, he had chosen to die on the open floor, not on his bed.

  “That is how his life became dreamlike for me and also how his colourful thread in my science and my life ran out.”

  On March 29, 2016, Farnworth’s play Calculating Kindness opened for a sold-out three-week run at the Camden People’s Theatre. It’s a small community venue not far from where Price lived, worked, and died (though in his day it was the Lord Palmerston pub).

  Given that Price didn’t selfishly desert his family, his equation wasn’t strictly about altruism, and his altruism didn’t directly cause his death, Farnworth had to make some choices about the story she was going to tell. She could stick to the morality tale with its inherently simplistic drama, or she could trust in the compelling tragedy of his life in all its complexity. In the end she decided the latter would be the right thing to do by George. She would present his shifting worldview and let the audience draw their own conclusions. As such, the play doesn’t offer any neat answers; it doesn’t tell anyone how to live, or how selfish or altruistic we should be. Like the Price equation, it describes what happened, not what will or ought to be.

  Among the audiences that came to see the show were Annamarie and Kathleen Price. Farnworth had invited them over from America but was still incredibly nervous about what their reaction would be. They were delighted. Kathleen said she saw the essence of her father onstage.

  While in London, the sisters took the opportunity to arrange for a headstone to be placed at their father’s grave. Below his name, it reads: “Father. Altruist. Friend.” And there at the bottom, the Price equation, engraved in stone.

  SONIA SMITH

  Unfriendly Climate

  FROM Texas Monthly

  One clear day last spring, Katharine Hayhoe walked into the limestone chambers of the Austin City Council to brief the members during a special meeting on how prepared the city was to deal with disasters and extreme weather. A respected atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, the 43-year-old had been invited to discuss climate change, and she breezed through her PowerPoint slides, delivering stark news in an upbeat manner: unless carbon emissions were swiftly curbed, in the coming decades Texas would see stronger heat waves, harsher summers, and torrential rainfall separated by longer periods of drought.

  “Why do we care about all of this stuff?” Hayhoe asked. “Because it has huge financial impacts.” The number of billion-dollar weather disasters in the United States had ballooned from one or two per year in the ’80s to eight to 12 today, Hayhoe explained as she pulled up a slide with a map of the country. “Texas is in the crosshairs of those events, because we get it all, don’t we? We get the floods and the droughts, the
hailstorms and the ice storms, and even the snow and the extreme heat. And we get the tornadoes, the hurricanes, and the sea-level rise. There isn’t much that we don’t get.”

  Soon afterward Don Zimmerman, a conservative councilman who before being elected regularly sued the city over tax increases, declared from his seat on the dais that climate change was a “nebulous” and “foolish” field of study. Zimmerman, wearing a banker’s collar and projecting an officious air into the room, continued, “We have maybe 30 years of satellite data, and the world is maybe millions of years old. I have a really visceral reaction against the climate-change argument, for the simple reason that when you look back in time, there have been dramatic climate changes before humanity ever existed.

  “The worst thing that can be done to humanity is put government bureaucrats in charge of carbon dioxide emissions,” he said as Hayhoe listened politely. “You don’t have to be as smart as a fifth grader to know that what causes the climate is the sun. I have people tell me, ‘Carbon dioxide warms the earth.’ No, it doesn’t. The sun warms the earth, and there is more energy in our sun than humanity can comprehend.” Zimmerman then insisted that the sun didn’t need “a permit from the EPA” to emit solar flares.

  An uncomfortable silence settled over the chamber for a moment before Hayhoe joked, “I think if the EPA could be in charge of the sun, that could create bigger problems than we have today.” She then proceeded to gut Zimmerman’s arguments. “A thermometer is not Democrat or Republican, and when we look around this world, it’s not about trusting what our 30-year-old satellites say. It’s about looking at 26,500 indicators of a warming planet, many of them we can see in our own backyards,” she said. The climate was not changing because of orbital cycles, which bring about ice ages, Hayhoe maintained. “The earth’s temperature peaked 8,000 years ago and was in a long, slow slide into the next ice age until the industrial revolution,” she said. Instead of being in this cooling period, the planet had seen its average temperature steadily rise. The sun was also not the culprit: “If the climate were changing because of the sun, we’d be getting cooler, because energy from the sun has been going down over the last 40 years,” she said.