by Oren Harman
But attributing George’s suicide strictly to illness somehow doesn’t feel entirely sufficient; there were life circumstances, too, after all. One of these was Sylvia. Unable to win her heart, George had become despondent. Whether he wanted to marry her because he thought Jesus wanted him to or not is, in a sense, beside the point. His heart was broken, and despair had descended. If the note that he left for her is to be taken at face value, George himself seemed to have decided that he would need to leave this world because of unrequited love.
And yet the suicide arrived just as, in his words to his daughter, George was “heading back upward.” After a year and a half of radical, selfless giving to others, he had come to see that it was time to take care of himself once again. He had decided to hold on to more of his possessions, he had stopped working tirelessly for alcoholics in the square and station and courtrooms and squats. He had begun to try to do some economics, and was planning to write to Samuelson at MIT. Clearly conflicted about whether or not to stay in genetics, he nevertheless seemed to have determined that being a full-time selfless angel was going nowhere.
What might have gone through his head when he thought such thoughts? What, in the final analysis, had his giving been all about?
One way to understand George’s unusual and courageous decision to take destitute and dangerously violent alcoholics off the street and bring them into his home is that it was a test. Pure and simple, this was a religious command. And since George himself came to believe that he was being led by Jesus on a path of suffering, he willingly accepted his fate. If giving to the needy meant having to leave his home, if having to leave his home meant living rough, if living rough meant being hungry and cold and losing all status—so be it. This was the Lord’s wish, and George would follow it, period. And if the Lord had determined that it was time for George to look after himself, then he would follow that command as well.17
But is it possible to penetrate further beneath the religious injunction? Is there a deeper truth lurking behind George’s own conscious explanation?
Widening the lens may help. Altruism, cooperation, and morality had in one form or another occupied George’s thoughts from the beginning. Back in Chicago, working on uranium enrichment for the Manhattan Project, George wondered why nations should hate one another and fight. Struggling to complete No Easy Way in the Village between instruction manuals for Sperry-Marine and bouts of drug-induced incapacity, he had racked his brain for the solution to the threat of mutually assured destruction. And yet, as he wrote to his editor, the world was changing too fast to get any kind of grip on the problem; unable to see the answer, George finally gave up.
Then came Ferguson and the operation, and quitting IBM. Leaving one life, he acquired another; having crossed the Atlantic from America to England, he found himself swimming in the ocean of evolutionary theory. It was there, in search of the origins of family, that he became acquainted with the field of social behavior, with the dynamics of personal and collective interest, and most of all with the problem of altruism. Plunging into Hamilton’s kin-selection mathematics and emerging with his own elegant covariance, George came to see that in nature, at least, goodness came about for a reason. Delving into game theory and surfacing with the logic of animal conflict, he understood that reciprocity was a utilitarian affair. Whether altruism came about at the altruist’s own expense because it helped shuttle related genes into the next generation, or because it somehow ended up paying for the altruist later in his life, there was always an interested logic involved. Even when a “truer” altruism evolved under group selection it could only work if the good of one group was to triumph over the good of another. Whether conscious or brainless, intended or instinctual, altruism was never truly “pure.”
But if science had painted a rather dour landscape of goodness, perhaps the spirit could transcend it after all. If ant workers helped their sisters only because it helped their genes; if a monkey helped another monkey only because he could cash in on the favor someday—perhaps man could do better. Perhaps George could do better. Inviting homeless strangers into his apartment was a beginning; in the vein of his constitutional extremism, giving them all he had and losing everything was the pushing of the envelope. If George’s own mathematics described a world where selflessness was always selfish, perhaps in his own actions he could prove that in humans this wasn’t necessarily so. If science could not provide the answer to the riddle of the origins of pure, universal goodness, if it could not even formulate the question necessary to fathom such mysterious depths, then perhaps George could find it elsewhere, in the fetid corners of Euston Station and the lonely benches of Soho Square. Perhaps pure selflessness resides in places science could never touch—in the unknown and unknowable recesses of the soaring human soul.
It was a courageous bid, a bold examination, and much was riding on it. But if this was indeed George’s goal, then its outcome may best explain his demise. For in the final analysis selflessness only led to further despair: None of the homeless people he tried to help ever left the bottle, none returned to their families, none changed their ways. He himself had wallowed in misery, too sick and too hungry to be of any use even if he’d wanted to be. His own equation could reveal when altruism would evolve by benefiting the community despite being disadvantageous to the individual. But in his own life George had failed to find the balance.
This was bad enough, and yet it could always be chalked up to circumstance; coincidences, after all, were what defined the fundamentally incontrollable human experience. In truth a much more sinister realization was what had gotten to him, something that could not be a mere coincidence. It was a discovery infinitely more devastating. For no matter how much he wanted to forget himself, in the end he couldn’t. How could he discern if his selflessness was not just a masquerade, the self fooling the self only to please the self and nothing more? How could he know, apart from the ant, the monkey, and all the other creatures that abound in nature, whether his goodness, human goodness, was really genuine and pure?18
He had been blessed with an unusual intelligence. He had seen things that the greatest minds had failed to see before him. And yet all his rational powers stood useless before the conundrum: It was impossible to know. Trying to transcend science he had found that he couldn’t transcend biology: Despite the yearnings of his soul he was trapped in the prison of his brain. And, living in a squat with a broken window in the London winter, far away from his daughters, dejected, lonely, and weak, it may just have been a realization too difficult to bear. “Might go hay-wire but will never be humdrum,” his Harvard interviewers had presciently divined back in 1940 when he arrived as a young hopeful—and they were right. In utter despair and utter anguish, George had finally, insolvably, hit “Wittgenstein’s wall.”
In 1996, Bill Hamilton wrote Kathleen Price a letter remembering his old friend. George’s life, he explained, was like a novel, “kept exciting and unexpected right up to the last page.”19 Hamilton, who was to die at the height of his powers three years later from malaria-induced internal hemorrhaging following an ill-advised trip to the Congo to discover the origins of the virus responsible for AIDS, thought that George’s life had been a “completed work of art.” He may have been right. For, in a deep sense, what makes great works of art complete is that they remain forever incomplete. Explanations for events are at once myriad and mysterious; putting down a book, or walking away from a painting or a sculpture, or finishing listening to a piece of music, one always leaves with lingering thoughts that are neither questions nor answers. And so, whether George killed himself because of illness, unrequited love, confusion, or philosophical despair, his life and death continue to provide invaluable instruction. By crashing into “Wittgenstein’s wall,” George teaches us, like a great work of art, where the limits of our reason confront the depths of our soul.
Nothing makes this clearer than a sheet of paper Hamilton found among the discarded effects in the squat. Written by Richard W. De Haan,
“teacher of the Radio Bible Classic, worldwide ministry through radio, television, literature,” it was titled “Love is the Greatest!” and Hamilton paid little attention to it. But there was an important message there. “Men and women have always yearned for understanding, compassion, forgiveness, and deeds of loving-kindness from their fellowmen, but often they’ve been sadly disappointed,” it read.
And today more than ever in a world torn by strife and dissension, the crying need is for a real demonstration of love. You see, love would pour the oil of quietness upon the troubled waters of human relationships, heal the ugly wounds of strife and contention, and bring together those separated by hatred, jealousy and selfishness. No wonder the apostle concludes the tremendous 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians by emphasizing that of all the gifts of the Spirit, including faith and hope, the greatest is love.20
George Price lies in an unmarked grave in the Saint Pancras Cemetery in North London, flanked by a proud sycamore and a young weeping willow. Too weak or too ill or too heartbroken to follow this path peacefully, perhaps it was his ultimate and enduring message to the world he left behind.
Appendix 1: Covariance and Kin Selection1
Price did not himself show how Hamilton’s coefficient of relatedness in the narrow sense of common descent could be replaced with association. The first to do that was Hamilton in his 1970 paper. Later Queller expanded on this in a 1985 paper, “Kinship, Reciprocity and Synergism in the Evolution of Social Behaviour,” clarifying further (if it had yet to be entirely clear) that association need not mean genetic relatedness in the narrow sense of descent via direct replication.2
To see how the covariance equation translates into Hamilton’s kin-selection equation, we begin with the equation wg = Cov (w, g) where g is the breeding value that determines the level of altruism. The least-squares multiple regression that predicts fitness, w, can be written as
where g´ is the average g value of an individual’s social neighbors, is a constant, and is the residual which is uncorrelated with g and g´. The are partial regression coefficients that summarize costs and benefits: is the effect an individual’s breeding value has on its own fitness in the presence of neighbors’ g´ (that is, the cost of altruism), and is the effect of an individual’s breeding value on the fitness of its neighbors (that is, the benefit of altruism). Substituting into the covariance equation and solving for the condition under which wg > 0 gives us Hamilton’s inclusive fitness equation (rB > C) in the following form
where is the regression coefficient of relatedness.
This derivation, performed by Hamilton in 19703 following Price, clearly shows that it is natural to use statistical association instead of common descent. It is considered the first modern theoretical treatment of inclusive fitness.
Among other things, it allows us to see that spiteful behavior, where an organism acts in such a way as to harm itself in order to harm another organism even more, can evolve since the product of a negative relatedness and a negative benefit to the recipient (harm) is positive, meaning that benefit multiplied by relatedness can outweigh the cost.
Appendix 2: The Full Price Equation and Levels of Selection1
Unbeknownst to George Price in 1968, the simple covariance relationship
(1) wz = Cov (w, z)
had already been worked out and published independently by two other men, Robertson and Li, in 1966 and 1967 respectively.2 But the uniqueness of the full Price equation stems from the inclusion of the further, expectation term. Here is the derivation:
Let there be a population in which each element is labeled by an index i. The frequency of elements with index i is qi, and each element with index i has some character, zi. Elements with a common index form a subpopulation that comprises a fraction qi of the total population, and no restrictions are placed on how the elements are grouped.
Now imagine a second, descendant, population with frequencies q´i and characters z´i. The change in the average character value, between the mother and descendant populations is
This equation applies to anything that evolves because z can be defined however one likes. For this reason, the equation applies not only to genetics, but to any selection process whatsoever.
What is special about the Price equation is the way in which it associates statistically between entities in groups, a “mother” and “daughter” population. Instead of the value of qi obtaining from the frequency of elements with index i in the daughter population, it obtains from the proportion of the daughter population derived from the elements in with index i in the mother population. If we define the fitness of the element i as wi, the contribution to the daughter population from type i in the mother population, then q´i =qi wi/ where is the mean fitness of the mother population.
The character values z´i also use indices of the mother population. The value of z´i is the average character value of the descendants of index i. The way it is obtained is by weighing the character value of each entity of the index i in the daughter population by the fraction of the total fitness of i that it represents. The change in character value for descendants of i is defined as zi = z´i–zi.
Equation (2) holds with these definitions for q´i and z´i. With a few substitutions and rearrangements we derive:
which, using standard definitions from statistics for covariance (Cov) and expectation (E) gives the full Price equation:
The two terms on the right-hand side of the equation can be thought of as the selection and transmission terms, respectively. Covariance between fitness and character represents the change in the character due to differential reproductive success, whereas the expectation term is a fitness-weighted measure of the change in character valued between the mother and daughter populations. The full equation, therefore, describes both selective changes within a generation and the response to selection.
But the addition of the expectation terms also allows to expand the equation to show selection working at different levels. Here is how the equation can expand itself:
where E and Cov are taken over their subscripts where there is ambiguity, and j·i are subsets of the group i with members that have index j.
The recursive expansion of equation (3) shows that the transmission is itself an evolutionary event that can be partitioned into selection among subgroups and transmission of those subgroups. The expansion of the trailing expectation term can continue (say from gene, to individual, to group, to species) until no change occurs during transmission in the final level. Meanwhile, however, it will be possible to see how much of the change in trait is due to selection at each of the levels below.
Appendix 3: Covariance and the Fundamental Theorem
Consider the reduced form of the Price equation
wz = Cov (w, z) = wzVz
where w is fitness and z is a quantitative character. The equation shows that the change in the average value of a character, z, depends on the covariance between the character and its fitness or, equivalently, the regression coefficient of fitness on the character multiplied by the variance of the character.
Since fitness itself is a quantitative character, z can be equal to fitness, w. Then the regression wz equals 1 and the variance, Vw is the variance in fitness. So the equation shows that the change in mean fitness, w, is proportional to the variance in fitness, Vw. This is what most people took Fisher’s fundamental theorem to mean: The change in mean fitness of a population depends on the variance in fitness.
Price, however, showed that Fisher didn’t mean this in a general but rather in a very specific way. Fisher had defined mean fitness in a way different than usually construed. For him it related only to that portion of fitness dependent on the additive genetic variance. All other components relevant to phenotypic variance—including epistasis and dominance—were categorized as “environment” and left out of the equation. Since it was known that epistatic and dominance effects can reduce fitness, along with the obvious fact that the environment can degrade, George interpreted Fish
er’s fundamental theorem as exactly true in its own terms, but not as biologically significant as Fisher had made it out to be.
Acknowledgments
I was sitting beneath a tree in a small park in Paris when I first read about George Price. It was 1999, and Andrew Brown’s The Darwin Wars: How Stupid Genes Became Selfish Gods opened with a chapter called “The Deathbed of an Altruist.” It was a mysterious story about a strange American who had come to London, written an equation that drove him first to Christianity, then to selfless aid to the homeless, and finally to suicide. There was some kind of connection between his equation and his life. What a story! I thought. This was the stuff of movies.
At the time I was in the middle of a doctorate and, returning to Oxford, forgot about Price. Seven years later in Jerusalem, while writing an essay review for the New Republic on Lee Dugatkin’s book The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists’ Search for the Origins of Goodness, the memory came back to me, though the story had always remained in the back of my subconscious mind. Here was Price again, just as enigmatic as before, killing himself on the altar of altruism. But as with Brown, so too with Dugatkin: Price was afforded no more than a few pages. Was this all that was known of him?