by Oren Harman
George pondered the larger meanings. Was there really nothing special about altruism? In evolutionary terms only a thin blue line seemed to separate it from spite. What determined whether a living being should act kindly or with malice had nothing to do with an “essence” or “inner core”—both, after all, resided within us. Instead, if the surrounding creatures were similar altruism could evolve; if they were different, spite was the solution. Pure unadulterated goodness was a fiction.
It was a shocking thought. And yet strangely, on further reflection, it was also laden with hope. For the adaptive success of altruism depended on the social environment, on society. Short of some unsullied divine morality, goodness could flourish if it was recognized as important. Institutionalize cooperation and you kill competition; valorize self-interest and you penalize altruism. Virtue was already within us but needed to be helped along. Perhaps Skinner held a piece of the truth after all: Create the right conditions and goodness would see the light.
There was still no word from Nature about the antlers paper, but George was optimistic. Most important now was this new selection math. Finally he’d been sticking to one problem and not jumping around as he’d always done. “I think this work I’m doing,” he wrote to Alice, emphasizing the adjective, “is really going to lead to something important.”29
Then, on September 24, he relayed the news:
Dear Mother,
Something wonderful and totally unexpected happened to me an hour or so ago. I have been working on a paper on mathematical genetics and evolution, and I obtained a mathematical result that looked very interesting, but it was so simple that I felt sure someone must have discovered it before. So this morning I went to talk to a Professor Smith, an expert on mathematical genetics in the Department of Human Genetics in University College of the University of London. He looked at my result and said it was interesting, very pretty, and he had never seen anything like it before.30
“He liked it so much that he took me to meet the department chair,” he carried on in an excited letter to Annamarie. “90 minutes later,” he continued to a friend, “I walked out with a room assigned to me, with keys, plus request for curriculum vitae so that they could make it official about giving me an honorary appointment.”31
A complete unknown walking off the street into the chair’s office and being given keys to a room of his own in arguably the world’s greatest department of human genetics in a matter of minutes? It was the miracle George Price had been waiting for.
Tucked away on little Stephenson Way east of Euston Station, the Galton Laboratory at UCL was a storied home. Great names had been attached to it—Karl Pearson, R. A. Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, Lionel Penrose—and now Harry Harris at the helm. “Like the chambers and corridors of some vast battleship,” an observer remarked, “its rooms often seem to be below surface even if they are not. Its parquet and paneling are easily overlooked: its underlying grandeur is subordinated to the practical demands of intellectual inquiry.”32
Cedric Austin Bardell Smith, Hamilton’s old boss, was the Weldon Professor of Biometry into whose office George had walked. A Leicester-born Quaker five years George’s senior, CABS was known for his gentle heart and mathematician’s quirky sense of humor. What did Jesus mean when he said, “Heaven equals ax2 + bx + c”? was an example (answer: It’s a parabola); another was the invention of a new system of arithmetic based on counting from one to five and replacing all numbers greater than that with the same number subtracted by ten and printed upside down. As a student at Cambridge he and three equally off beat friends formed the Trinity College Mathematical Society, publishing solutions to arcane problems under the pseudonym Blanche Descartes, a mythical Frenchwoman still referred to in the mathematical literature.33
One example was the problem of whether it is possible to cut a square into smaller squares each of which is different. The solution gave birth to the “square squared,” a notion that proved highly useful in the design of electrical networks. Another example was the counterfeit coin problem: If you have twelve pennies, one of which is counterfeit and differs in that it is slightly heavier, and are given a pair of balance scales—what is the smallest number of weighings that will pick out the false coin? Cedric’s solution ended up pioneering the field of search theory, a branch of mathematics commonly used in computing, economics, and in locating airplane crashes and lost mountaineers. (The answer to the problem is 3.) Most of all, though, Cedric Smith had been a protégé of J. B. S. Haldane, inventing powerful methods to map genes on chromosomes. In fact he had succeeded him. He was one of the world’s leading biostatisticians.34
Meanwhile the skeletons of George’s past continued to haunt him. He had left his wife, abandoned his daughters, been a lousy son to his aging mother. His behavior was self-destructive, people said, and deep inside him he knew it was true. He was still “daydreaming about torturing Ferguson.” Back in America, Julia had come into her inheritance and could take care of the kids now. He was essential to no one; if he died not a soul in the world would be the worse for it. The UCL appointment was flattering but wouldn’t pay the bills. Unless something extraordinary happened he planned to kill himself, he wrote to Annamarie, “since it isn’t worth the bother of working just to stay alive.”35
And yet…
Family, strangers, altruism, spite—the ideas swam in his head like drunken piranhas. To tame them he’d need to turn to science. In a way, he knew, they were his lifelines. Under the positively impressed, somewhat flabbergasted gaze of CABS he hunkered down once again and went to work.
His goal was clear: to fathom the mystery of family. Mate choice, fatherhood, individual interest versus common good—these were the issues he would tackle. It was to be a clean affair, and perfectly rational, nothing like the mess he had made of his own life. Developing mathematical tools for making evolutionary inferences would be the only way “to protect against biasing effects of emotional prejudice.” Besides, quoting Haldane, with whose work he now began to become familiar, “an ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument.”36
In a direct translation of the optimization work he had done for IBM on the “register problem,” he set out to model human behavior. An “optimal” behavioral strategy was one that would maximize the frequency of an individual’s genes in the next generations. Just as Ardrey and Morris had done, the method would be to consider a problem facing tribes of twenty to fifty hominids in the Middle and Upper Pleistocene, imagine a number of alternative behavioral strategies that might serve as solutions to the problem, and then to compare them with present behavior. Under the assumption that our ancestors were very likely to have developed genetically optimal behavior and to have maintained it for a long time—after all, Homo sapiens was a highly successful species—the strategy most similar to observed behavior today would likely have been the one that had evolved.
He started with basics. How, for example, did our ancestors allocate food? One optimal solution could have been complete sharing and cooperation: promiscuous, noncompetitive mating, cooperative rearing of the young with little or no recognition of individual motherhood and fatherhood, and retaliation against anyone out for himself. Just as with the antler model, an individual would increase his fitness by cooperating with others and thereby avoiding punishment, and by helping to punish others deficient in cooperation and thereby causing them to cooperate. It would have been a veritable Stone Age Plato’s Republic.
But there was an alternative. What if the tribe chose cooperation in hunting by adult males, but individual and family action in all other areas? Hunting spoils would first be divided among the males, who would then distribute their share to women and children as a matter of personal choice. Such a system, George quickly saw, would favor monogamy, or at least something close to it. The reason was that if a man tended to keep the meat to himself when food was scarce so that his “wife” and children suffered severely while he ate comfortably, he would, on average, leave fewer descendants. Genes co
rrelated with such behavior, therefore, would soon diminish in the tribe, and the behavior become less common. On the other hand, if a man was a wonderful provider and yet tended to swap wives every few years, most of the time he’d be providing food for the children of other men while neglecting his own older off spring; therefore, since gene frequency is a ratio rather than an absolute amount, the better he was at providing, the more effective he’d be in decreasing the frequency of his own genes in the group.37
True, there existed sexually promiscuous societies that deviated substantially from monogamy. But considering the enormous changes in living conditions that had occurred over the last twenty thousand years, it was remarkable how much the vast majority of humanity seemed to behave in rough accordance with the family model. Hypothesis 2 was a better bet than hypothesis 1.
Family, then, had developed under selective pressures related to food distribution at a time in human evolution when hunting by all-male bands became important—perhaps when hominids came down from the trees and began walking the savannas. Amazingly, exalted “fatherhood” might have been an optimal solution to the mundane challenge of securing daily grub. Even the heights of love were just an invention to oil optimality. After all, George wrote to an instrument-maker friend in the States from the days when he was thinking of building Skinner his Teaching Machine, love couldn’t be an automatic consequence of “reinforcement” since it doesn’t necessarily bring happiness. Something more powerful, like genetic evolution, had to be responsible.38
But this was all conjecture. To rise above it George would have to turn to math. Math would help make sense of mate choice and sexual selection, of nepotism and spite, of reciprocity and cooperation, of the interaction of cultural and genetic inheritance. Most of all, though, it might help solve the ultimate riddle: Where had evolution placed its eggs—in the individual or the group? In the gene or the family? Whose interest was it really trying to optimize?
With these thoughts in mind, he took another look at his equation.
It was the beginning of March 1969. Back in America, Kathleen and her new husband, Ronnie, were expecting a baby, and Alice’s health was deteriorating. Clots in two toes had led to gangrene, Edison reported, and she was going to have to have her left leg amputated above the knee that week. The antlers paper had been provisionally accepted by Nature in February on the condition that it be substantially shortened. George was excited, but there was no time to celebrate. Once again the surgeons were having their way; he’d need to fly back immediately to see his mother for the last time.39
When he arrived at Midtown Hospital two days later, he found Alice in bed. The amputation had been a success but all was not well. “What happened in school today,” she asked, taking his hand and looking up at him sweetly. “Did you wear your shoes…. Did you drink your warm milk?”40
As Alice declined, Kathleen delivered a baby boy in California, Dominique. She had no idea that her father was in America. Fear of Julia causing trouble over arrears in his support payments had overcome any parental, and grandparental, sentimentality. He was staying at Alice’s home on West Ninety-third Street, going through all the old papers and photographs and closing it down. If she recovered, Alice would be going to the DeWitt Nursing Home. Meanwhile, George was selling furniture and getting rid of all her cats. Above all, he was battling Miss McCartney, the intransigent roomer, a seventy-five-year-old, two-hundred-pound, alcoholic former legal secretary, a “creature from a nightmare” who knew all tricks of the law and was unwilling to leave the apartment. Where, for goodness sake, had the days of the Japanese gentlemen gone?41
George had started the eviction process but was losing the battle. Short on cash, he had written to Al; Ludwig Luft, the instrument maker; and his elderly aunt Ethel in Michigan asking for loans. In his quirky way he even wrote to the president of Air Products & Chemical Corporation, based in Allentown, Pennsylvania, a man who in 1955 had contributed money to the University of Minnesota for George’s research on ESP. To Bentley Glass, geneticist and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he sent a fifty-two-page mathematical treatise on selection, asking whether Glass might help secure a fellowship for him, something, say, like a Guggenheim. None had replied yet, except Luft with $200. Edison had generously paid for George’s airfare and expenses, but bitter over little help from him at the apartment, George was depressed and exhausted.42
To escape Miss McCartney he’d take the subway downtown to the Forty-second Street Public Library in the afternoons. He had failed to interest any magazines in articles but got $275 for helping to write the master’s thesis in business administration of the uncle of a cute Yeshiva University grad student he’d met in the library. Sandy was more than twenty years his junior; going out with her made him feel young again. However wonderful the relationship, though, self-destructiveness, as usual, proved more comfortable a companion. “I am careful to keep my hate alive,” he wrote to Tatiana, “since to let it abate would be giving in to the evilness of Ferguson…. He has beaten me physically but as long as I hate him and seek revenge, he has not beaten me mentally.”43
Then, in mid-April, a third paper caught his eye.
Population growth, the biologist Garrett Hardin argued in “The Tragedy of the Commons” in Science, was a “no technical solution problem.”44 Like winning a game of tic-tac-toe against a competent opponent, or gaining more security in the Cold War by stockpiling weapons, maximizing population growth in a finite world was a technical impossibility. Malthus had been right, Adam Smith and his Chicago School followers mistaken. Limited resources render the Invisible Hand a farce; far from bringing about a collective paradise, individual interest will hasten the ruin of all. Borrowing a metaphor printed in a little-known pamphlet by an amateur mathematician in 1833,45 Hardin explained:
Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.46
The reason was because each and every herdsman asking himself, What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd? would answer in the same way: Since the benefit would all accrue to him while the cost (of depleting the commons) would be shared by everyone, adding one more animal would always be the thing to do. And another, and another. “Therein is the tragedy,” Hardin bemoaned. “Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited.”
The ultimate result would be the destruction of the commons. Whether it was the use of national parks, radio frequencies, parking, fishing, foresting, or pollution, there was a true conflict between personal interest and the common good. John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern had already shown that maximizing for two variables is a mathematical impossibility; if the tragedy of the commons was going to be solved, nothing but “a fundamental extension in morality” would suffice.
For Hardin, a hardened realist, an appeal to conscience wouldn’t work, though; it was “mutual coercion mutually agreed upon” that was humanity’s hope for deliverance. The trick, far from expecting all men suddenly to become angels, was to devise clever mechanisms of regulation that, as far as possible, would allay the conflict between the common good and the pursuit of personal gain. In a way it was Skinner all over again. Freedom, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights notwithstanding, could not always be just a matter of personal choice. At times, as Hegel had realized, it amounted to nothing more than the “recognition of necessity.”
Sitting in the New York Public Library, fretting over his return uptown to the “nightmare” Miss McCartney, George saw immediately how the traged
y of the commons applied to evolution. After all, in nature there was also often a conflict between the good of the group and the individual. And yet, as far as he could tell, group selection was dead: Hamilton, Maynard Smith, and Williams had seen to its demise.
George decided to keep a more open mind. For group selection to work there needed to be differences between groups in a population. Evolutionists had rejected such a possibility based on their rejection of Sewall Wright’s 1945 model; migration between groups would swamp any differences created by random drift. But Wright himself, George had learned in correspondence, now saw his own model as a gross simplification; from his perspective its rejection was neither here nor there with respect to group selection.47
Group selection was theoretically possible; this much even Maynard Smith had willingly allowed. But it could be more than this, possibly a reality. In fact, Hamilton had suggested a perfect example of group selection in his paper on extraordinary departures from Fisher’s 1:1 sex ratio, though no one seemed to notice, including Hamilton himself. Mammals, too, seemed to challenge the wisdom of the day. While both possessed well-developed social dominance systems, neither chimpanzees nor gorillas, for example, exhibited competition between males for mates. Still more puzzling were male wolves: The small amount of evidence available suggested that there is an inverse relation between dominance and mating success. True, Wynne-Edwards had been consigned to the back pages of history, but such behaviors were difficult to square purely on individual selection.48