The Price of Altruism

by Oren Harman

  23. Alice Avery Price letter to Remco Real Estate, Dec. 26, 1934, EPFA.

  24. Alice Avery Price letter to Mr. Kelly, Transfer Tax Commission, Jan 30, 1935, EPFA.

  25. Edison Price letter to Mr. Elias Aaronson, December 9, 1936, EPFA; Alice Avery Price letter to Edison, undated, EPFA.

  26. Wasserman, “The Good Old Days of Poverty.”

  27. Alice Avery Price letter to Chief Inspector George G. Henry, September 14, 1934, EPFA; Alice letter to Transfer Tax Commission.

  28. Gage H. Avery letter to Clara Avery, January 27, 1932, EPFA.

  29. Alice Avery Price letter to Mr. Barzo, Nov. 16, 1932, EPFA.

  30. See Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Michelle Baldwin, Burlesque and the New Bump-and-Grind (Golden, CO: Speck Press, 2004), especially 1–16.

  31. “Moss Weighs Ban on 14 Burlesques,” New York Times, April 30, 1937; “La Guardia Backs Ban,” New York Times, May 3, 1937.

  32. Alice Avery Price letter to Edison, July 9, 1936, EPFA.

  33. See Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974), and Kenneth T. Jackson and Hillary Ballon, eds., Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).

  34. A good description of New York City in the 1930s can be found in Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), 19–37.

  35. For an endearing fictional account of this development, see Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (New York: Picador, 2000), 74–77.

  36. Alice Avery Price letter to Edison, undated, circa 1936, EPFA.

  37. Numerous letters between Alice Avery Price and Edison Price, 1934–38, EPFA.

  38. “Louise Birch, 97, Dead; Co-Founder of School,” New York Times, September 29, 1976; Birch Wathen yearbook (1935), 16. Two of the school’s most celebrated alumni in later years would be Barbara Walters and Brooke Shields.

  39. “The History of Greek Temple Architecture,” by George Price, George Price Papers (GPP).

  40. Alice Avery Price letter to Edison Price, July 5, 1938, EPFA; Alice Avery Price letter to Miss Louise Birch, September 6, 1938, EPFA.

  41. Susan E. Meyer, Stuyvesant High School: The First 100 Years (New York: Campaign for Stuyvesant/Alumni and Friends Endowment Inc., 2005), 10.

  42. See Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: New York City 1805–1973 (New York: Basic Books, 1974).

  43. Meyer, Stuyvesant, 14, 11, 15.

  44. New York Times, October 27, 1907.

  45. Interview with Richard A. Bader, Stuyvesant class of June 1940, May 7, 2008; Stuyvesant High School Yearbook, June 1940; Meyer, Stuyvesant, 24, 16–17.

  46. Interview with Dan Morris, Stuyvesant class of June 1940, May 2, 2008.

  47. Ibid.

  48. Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life: The Early Years (New York: Dial Press, 1982), quoted in Meyer, Stuyvesant, 45.

  49. “’Til We Meet Again,” Indicator (school yearbook), June 1940, 102; interview with Richard A. Bader, May 7, 2008.

  50. W. H. Bradshaw, “The Citadel,” Indicator, June 1940, 7.

  51. Sinclair J. Wilson, “Lost Horizon,” Indicator, June 1940, 13; interviews with Dan Morris, May 2, 2008, and with Richard A. Bader, May 7, 2008.

  52. George Price letter to Abe Shlemewitz, August 15, 1940, GPP; George Price letter to Mr. Sternberg, August 17, 1940, GPP; “Harvard College, Principal’s Report on Applicant,” March 15, 1940, Harvard University Archive (HUC).

  53. Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence, 24, 25.

  54. David Gelernter, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair (New York: HarperPerennial, 1996); “Stuyvesant High School Permanent Record—George R. Price,” June 30, 1940, Stuyvesant Archives; “Harvard College Freshman Scholarship Application,” March 15, 1940, HUA; “Harvard College Freshman Scholarship Personal Interview Report,” May 24, 1940, HUA.

  CHAPTER 3: SELECTIONS

  1. Joan Fisher Box, Ronald A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1978).

  2. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 58.

  3. Box, Ronald A. Fisher, 13.

  4. A. W. F. Edwards, “The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection,” Genetics 154 (2000), 1419–26, quote on 1420.

  5. “Regression to the mean” was Galton’s terminology, not Jenkin’s. Fleeming Jenkin, “Review of Darwin’s Origin of Species,” North British Review 46 (1867), 277–318. Darwin’s solution was to fall back increasingly on the inheritance of acquired traits, and to posit unseen “pangenes” whose very existence even he described as “provisional.”

  6. Peter Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 70; William Provine, The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).

  7. Quoted in Marek Kohn, A Reason for Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 95. The portraits of Fisher, Haldane, Maynard Smith, and Hamilton in this chapter and chapter 7 borrow generously from Kohn’s wonderful book.

  8. R. A. Fisher, “Some Hopes of a Eugenist,” Eugenics Review 5 (1914), 309–15. Many contemporary eugenicists focused on “negative eugenics,” meaning steps to be taken to contain the procreation of the weak and unsocial elements in society, such as sterilization. Fisher preferred “positive eugenics,” namely steps to be taken to encourage the procreation of the fitter elements of society, such as family allowances and tax-cut incentives.

  9. Kohn, A Reason for Everything, 101.

  10. R. A. Fisher, “The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 52 (1918), 399–433.

  11. “Correlation Between Relatives” was not strictly about evolution, but it showed that trait similarity could be explained by recourse to Mendelian genetics, rendering clear the implications for evolution, at least for Fisher if not at first for others.

  12. Udney G. Yule had made the same claim back in 1902 but went unheeded. See his “Mendel’s Laws and Their Probable Relations to Intraracial Heredity,” New Phytologist 1 (1902), 193–207, 222–38.

  13. Kohn, A Reason for Everything, 142. See also Ronald W. Clark, J. B. S.: The Life and Work of J. B. S. Haldane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).

  14. See Martin Goodman, Suffer and Survive: Gas Attacks, Miner’s Canaries, Spacesuits and the Bends: The Extreme Life of J. S. Haldane (London: Pocket Books, 2007).

  15. On J. S. Haldane’s philosophy see S. Sturdy, “Biology as Social Theory: John Scott Haldane and Physiological Regulation,” British Journal of the History of Science 21 (1988), 315–40. For J. S. Haldane’s own writings see The Philosophical Basis of Biology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1931), and The Philosophy of a Biologist, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935).

  16. “I am enjoying life here very much,” he wrote to his father in February 1915. “I have got a most ripping job as a bomb officer.” To his mother he wrote: “I find this sort of fighting very enjoyable.”

  17. Haldane’s wartime paper showing the genetic linkage between albinism and pink eyes in mice was written with his sister Naomi and his friend A. D. Sprunt, who was killed in battle before it was published: J. B. S. Haldane, A. D. Sprunt, and N. H. Haldane, “Reduplication in Mice,” Journal of Genetics 5 (1915), 133–35; J. S. Haldane is credited with inventing the gas mask that saved countless Allied lives in World War I.

  18. Kohn, A Reason for Everything, 149.

  19. “J.B.S. was against—against authority, and against the government, any authority and any government; if possible in the cause of reason; if not as a matter of principle,” Clark, The Life and Work of J. B. S. Haldane, 20.

  20. John Herschel, P
hysical Geography (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1861), 12.

  21. For a perspective on Fisher’s statistical accomplishments and legacy see Anders Hald, A History of Mathematical Statistics 1750 to 1930 (New York: Wiley, 1998).

  22. Edwards, “The Genetical Theory,” 1423.

  23. Interesting appreciations of The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection can be found in Edwards, “The Genetical Theory” James F. Crow, “R. A. Fisher, a Centennial View,” Genetics 124 (1990), 207–11, and “Fisher’s Contributions to Genetics and Evolution,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 38 (1990), 263–75; E. G. Leigh, Jr., “Ronald Fisher and the Development of Evolutionary Theory,” in Oxford Surveys in Evolutionary Biology, vol. 3, ed. Richard Dawkins and Mark Ridley (London: Oxford University Press, 1986), 187–223; Richard Lewontin, “Theoretical Population Genetics in the Evolutionary Synthesis,” in The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology, ed. Ernst Mayr and William B. Provine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 58–68; and in the foreword to the Variorum Edition of Fisher’s Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, J. H. Bennett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Quotation in Edwards, “The Genetical Theory,” 1422.

  24. Attempts to understand the fundamental theorem, and George Price’s solution, will be discussed in chapter 10.

  25. On Fisher’s notion of progress see Michael Ruse, Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 295–303.

  26. Quoted in Kohn, A Reason for Everything, 96.

  27. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Charles Darwin, M Notebook, 1838.

  28. R. A. Fisher, “The Evolution of the Conscience in Civilized Communities,” Eugenics Review 14 (1922), 190–93.

  29. R. A. Fisher, “The Renaissance of Darwinism,” The Listener 37 (1947), 1001, 1009, quoted in Kohn, A Reason for Everything, 108; R. A. Fisher, “Indeterminism and Natural Selection,” Philosophy of Science 1 (1934), 99–117.

  30. Cyril Darlington, “Recollections of Haldane” (draft), Darlington Papers (DP): C. 108: J. 86.

  31. Quoted in Clark, The Life and Work of J. B. S. Haldane, 160.

  32. Ibid., 115.

  33. J. B. S. Haldane, The Inequality of Man and Other Essays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932), quote on 121. On the culture and politics of British science at the time see William McGuken, Scientists, Society, and State: The Social Relations of Science Movement in Great Britain 1931–1947 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984).

  34. J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Essays (London: Harper and Brothers, 1928), 220–21. See also Charlotte Haldane’s Truth Will Out (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1949) for a colorful account of the couple’s life together.

  35. Haldane vacillated between attributing actual novel scientific discovery, as opposed to understanding, or knowing “what to look for,” as opposed to telling you what you “are going to find,” to the dialectical method. Compare “A Dialectical Account of Evolution,” Science & Society 1 (1937), 473–86, to The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences (London: Ayer 1939; reprint, Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 43. As for how he got to Marxism, Haldane cited English capitulation to fascism alongside “recent developments in physics and biology.”

  36. J. B. S. Haldane, The Causes of Evolution (London: Longmans, Green, 1932). The series of nine papers can be found in Mark Ridley, Evolution, CD-ROM (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

  37. Both Anthony Edwards and James Crow shared this view of Haldane as a mathematician: Kohn, A Reason for Everything, 145.

  38. To be fair, Haldane didn’t follow dialectical materialism blindly. Fisher argued that selection could produce modifier genes that would “negate” the effect of dominant deleterious mutations, a “beautifully dialectical theory” that Haldane rejected.

  39. For a critical rendition of the story of the betularia see Judith Hopper, Of Moths and Men: The Untold Story of Science and the Peppered Moth (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).

  40. Scholars argue about the extent and manner in which dialectical materialism played a role in Haldane’s science. Arthur M. Shapiro shows that Haldane’s evolutionary papers in the 1920s became increasingly dialectical but puts it down to Hegel, via Uffer, rather than Marx. See his “Haldane, Marxism and the Conduct of Research,” Quarterly Review of Biology 68 (1993), 69–77. Sahotra Sarkar argues that it was via his mechanistic and reductionist scientific work that Haldane became a Marxist, rather than his politics, or any form of philosophy, influencing his science. See his “Science, Philosophy, and Politics in the Work of J.B.S. Haldane, 1922–1937,” Biology and Philosophy 7 (1992), 385–409.

  41. J. B. S. Haldane, “The Effect of Variation on Fitness,” American Naturalist 71 (1937), 337–49, and “The Cost of Natural Selection,” Journal of Genetics 55 (1957), 511–24. This line of thought later led to Motoo Kimura’s “neutral theory” of evolution, whereby natural selection is “blind” to much of the genetic mutation in a population, which therefore has little or no effect on population fitness.

  42. On Lysenko see David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), Zhores Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, trans. Michael Lerner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), and Nils Roll-Hansen, The Lysenko Affect: The Politics of Science (New York: Humanity Books, 2004). A large literature is discussed in Oren Solomon Harman, “C. D. Darlington and the British and American Reaction to Lysenko and the Soviet Conception of Science,” Journal of the History of Biology 36 (2003), 309–52. On Vavilov see Peter Pringle, The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin’s Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008).

  43. Haldane, The Inequality of Man, 136; J. B. S. Haldane, Heredity and Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938), 14.

  44. Boris Ephrussi said this of Haldane, quoted in Clark, The Life and Work of J. B. S. Haldane, 109.

  45. Ruse, Monad, 367.

  46. Sewall Wright, “The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection: A Review,” Journal of Heredity 21 (1930), 340–56.

  47. See Sewall Wright, “Evolution in Mendelian Populations,” Genetics 16 (1931), 97–159. Also, “The Roles of Mutation, Inbreeding, Crossbreeding and Selection in Evolution,” Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Genetics 1 (1932), 356–66, and “Adaptation and Selection,” in Glenn L. Jepson, Ernst Mayr, and George Gaylord Simpson, Genetics, Paleontology and Evolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), 365–89.

  48. Sewall Wright finally produced a book-size exposition of his complete evolutionary worldview late in life in Evolution: Selected Papers, ed. William B. Provine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). There is also Wright, Evolution and the Genetics of Populations, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

  49. R. A. Fisher, “The Measurement of Selective Intensity,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 121 (1936), 58–62.

  50. It was T. H. Huxley’s grandson and Haldane’s old Eton friend Julian Huxley who gave the enterprise its name. See his Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (London: Allen and Unwin, 1942).

  51. The treatment of this problem came in the chapter “The Evolution of Distastefulness” in Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection.

  52. Ibid., 159.

  53. Sewall Wright, “Coefficients of Inbreeding and Relationship,” American Naturalist 56 (1922), 330–38.

  54. This exposition exists in Dugatkin, The Altruism Equation, 81–82.

  55. Sewall Wright, “Tempo and Mode in Evolution: A Critical Review,” Ecology 26 (1945), 415–19.

  56. On group selection see Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  57. J. B. S. Haldane, “Darwinism Today,” in Possible Worlds, 35.

  58. Haldane
, Causes of Evolution, 71; quoted in Dugatkin, The Altruism Equation, 72.

  59. Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, 163.

  60. J. B. S. Haldane, “Population Genetics,” New Biology 18 (1955), 34–51, quote on 44.

  61. Ibid.

  62. Precisely why Fisher, Haldane, and Wright did not work out mathematical models of the evolution of genes for altruism is a matter of speculation. Some possible answers are discussed in Dugatkin, The Altruism Equation, 82–85.