by Oren Harman
63. Legends are as legends go. Before it ballooned into the drunken stupor tale, it was John Maynard Smith who told the pub story, situating it at the now-defunct Orange Tree off the Euston Road in London, and with Haldane calculating alertly on the back of an envelope rather than inebriated. Bill Hamilton was angered by what he took to be Maynard Smith’s misplaced—and trivializing—memory. He had worked out the math painstakingly over two years, and it was his own comment, he thought, that Maynard Smith mistakenly attributed to Haldane.
64. Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 307.
65. Diane Paul, “A War on Two Fronts: J. B. S. Haldane and the Response to Lysenkoism in Britain,” Journal of the History of Biology 16 (1983), 1–37.
66. Clark, J. B. S., 209. On Haldane in India see Krishna Dronamraju, Haldane: The Life and Work of J.B.S. with Special Reference to India (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1985).
CHAPTER 4: ROAMING
1. “Class of ’44, 1050 Strong, Registers Today at Memorial Hall; Dean Chase Sounds Welcome,” Harvard Crimson, September 20, 1940.
2. Roger Rosenblatt, Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969 (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1997), 94; Harvard Crimson, September 20, 1940; Harvard University Directory of Students, published by the university (Cambridge, MA: October 1940), 79.
3. George Price transcript, Harvard College, 1940–41, HUA.
4. Richard D. Edwards, “Harvard Views the War,” Class of 1941 Album, Harvard University Archive (HUA), 252–61, quotes on 258, 252, 255.
5. Ibid., 259.
6. Ibid, 260–61.
7. Quoted in Rosenblatt, Coming Apart, 98.
8. George Price letter to Gage Avery, August 1941, EPFA; George Price letter to Abraham B. Albert, August 9, 1941, EPFA.
9. David Freeman Hawke, John D.: The Founding Father of the Rockefellers (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); Charles R. Morris, The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Super-economy (New York: Owl Books, 2006); William J. Barber, “Political Economy in an Atmosphere of Academic Entrepreneurship: The University of Chicago,” in Breaking the Academic Mould: Economics and American Learning in the Nineteenth Century, ed. William J. Barber (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 241. There had been an original founding of the University of Chicago in 1857, incidentally, under the auspecies of Senator Stephen A. Douglas, but a mortgage foreclosure had shut its doors in 1886.
10. Milton Mayer, Young Man in a Hurry: The Story of William Rainey Harper (Chicago: University of Chicago Alumni Association, 1957), 22; Edward Shils, ed., Remembering the University of Chicago: Teachers, Scientists and Scholars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), xii; Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, recorded by Lucien Price (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954), 137.
11. William Michael Murphy and D. J. R. Bruckner, eds., The Idea of the University of Chicago: Selections from the Papers of the First Eight Executives of the University of Chicago from 1891 to 1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 2; Mayer, Young Man in a Hurry, 61; Mary Ann Dzuback, Robert M. Hutchins: Portrait of an Educator (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), 74; J. L. Laughlin, “Academic Liberty,” Journal of Political Economy (January 1906), 41–43, quote on 43.
12. “When War Came,” in News of the Quadrangles, University of Chicago Magazine 34 (December 1941), 10–11.
13. Robert M. Hutchins, “The State of the University, November 1, 1943: A Report to the Friends of the University of Chicago,” 3–4, University of Chicago Archives (UCA); “Meet the Army Meteorologists,” Daily Maroon, September 30, 1942, 4.
14. “Theory, Mud, Maneuvers,” University of Chicago Magazine 34 (December 1941), 11.
15. Don Morris, News of the Quadrangles, University of Chicago Magazine 35 (May 1943), 18.
16. Martin Gardner, “All Out for War,” University of Chicago Magazine 34 (January 1942), 15.
17. Robert M. Hutchins, “The State of the University, September 10th, 1942,” 22, UCA; ibid., 7–11.
18. “Prep For Mustache Race,” Daily Maroon, February 20, 1942, 1; Ellen Baum, “The Traveling Bazaar,” Daily Maroon, February 22, 1946, 2.
19. Hutchins, “The State of the University,” 13–14; George Price transcript, 1941–43, University of Chicago, Office of the Registrar.
20. Communication from Al Somit, May 15, 2008. George had been renting a room in the home of Professor Thorfin Hogness of the Chemistry Department until then: George Price letter to Don Fergusson, Oct. 28, 1960, GPP.
21. “Discrimination Clauses in Club Constitutions,” Daily Maroon, March 6, 1942, 2; Harold W. Flitcraft, ed., History of the 57th Street Meeting of Friends (Chicago: 57th Street Meeting of Friends), 32.
22. Interview with Al Somit, December 6, 2007.
23. Al Somit letter to George Price, January 4, 1943, GPP.
24. Interview with Al Somit, April 16, 2008; Ellis Student Cooperative Handbook, September 1942, GPP.
25. George Price letter to Bob Sheffield, February 6, 1945, GPP.
26. “Coffee Shop Gone out of Business,” Daily Maroon, April 30, 1943, 2.
27. “The University and the War,” official publications of the University of Chicago, 1944, 34, CUA.
28. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the American Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986).
29. Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).
30. George Price transcript; Allie Shah, “Medical Researcher Samuel Schwartz Dies,” Star Tribune, December 9, 1997; George Price letter to Dr. Herman H. Goldstine, October 28, 1964, GPP.
31. George Price, “Fluorescence of Uranium, Plutonium, Neptunium, and Americium, A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Division of the Physical Sciences in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, the University of Chicago Department of Chemistry, August 6, 1946” Samuel Schwartz Papers (SSP), University of Minnesota Medical School, Box 12, Schwartz’s notes.
32. Ibid., 6–7.
33. Interviews with Kathleen Price, April 12, 2008, and April 13, 2008; interview with Al Somit, April 16, 2008.
34. Chet Opal, “Victory!” University of Chicago Magazine 37 (May 1945), 13.
35. Alice Avery Price letter to George Price, August 14, 1945, GPP.
36. George Price letter to Alice Avery Price, August 20, 1945, GPP.
37. “Mecca of the Caffeine Addicts Soon to Reopen,” Daily Maroon, February 22, 1946, 5.
38. George Price letter to Fred, August 19, 1946, GPP.
39. George Price letter to Dr. Erwin Haas, August 17, 1946, GPP; George Price letter to Fred, August 19, 1946, GPP; Robert M. Hutchins, “The State of the University, September 25, 1945,” 28, and “November 25, 1946,” 18, UCA.
40. Interview, Kathleen Price, April 13, 2008; Directory of University Officers and Students, November 25, 1946, 118, and June 1947, 138, HUA.
41. Communication from Professor Gilbert Stork, January 11, 2008; communication from Professor Leonard K. Nash, May 5, 2008.
42. Lloyd Shapley letter to George Price, February 3, 1947, GPP; Lloyd A. Wood letter to George Price, October 24, 1947, GPP; “Chess Club Takes Lead in Crucial Match,” Harvard Crimson, March 1, 1947.
43. Archival materials and historical sources are on the official Argonne National Laboratory Web site, www.anl.gov.
44. Claude E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal 27 (July 1948), 379–423 (October 1948), 623–66.
45. University of Minnesota, Office of the President, “Request for Information,” May 9, 1950, University of Minnesota Archives (UMA).
46. John W. Rae and John W. Rae, Jr., Morristown’s Forgotten Past: “The Gilded Age” (Morristown, NJ: John W. Rae, 1980).
47. George Price, “Transistor Work Already Started That Would Be Simple and Valuable to Finish,”
draft, June 27, 1949, GPP.
48. Interviews with Annamarie Price, April 15 and 17, 2008.
49. George Price letter to Al Somit, February 1, 1953, GPP.
50. Stanford Lehmberg and Ann M. Pflaum, The University of Minnesota 1945–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 51–53; Jay Edgerton, “U. of M. Medical College Had Become One of the World’s Greatest,” Minneapolis Star, January 28, 1955.
51. “Conference Agenda,” box 4; “Memo,” box 10, Samuel Schwartz Papers (SSP). The eventual paper was titled, “Some Relationships of Porphyrins, Tumors, and Ionizing Radiations,” University of Minnesota Medical Bulletin 27 (1955), 7–13.
52. Box 10, SSP.
53. Samuel Schwartz letter to Dr. Avram Goldstein, January 25, 1978, box 33, SSP.
54. Box 1, SSP, undated.
55. George Price letter to Bob and Marjorie Sheffield, December 3, 1953, GPP.
56. George Price letter to Al Somit, February 1, 1953, GPP.
57. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War (London: Penguin, 2005).
58. Jean and Fairfield Hoban telegram to George Price, September 30, 1953, GPP; Julia Price letter to Alice Avery Price, December 10, 1953, GPP; Alice Avery Price letter to George Price, September 22, 1953, GPP.
CHAPTER 5: FRIENDLY STARFISH, SELFISH GAMES
1. Clay Blair, Jr., “Passing of a Great Mind,” Life, February 25, 1957, 89–90, quote on 89.
2. William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), 5; Blaer, “Passing of a Great Mind.”
3. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776; reprint edited by Edwin Cannan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
4. Veblen first used the term “neoclassical” in “Preconceptions of Economic Science,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 13 (January 1899).
5. Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Two Lives: The Story of Wesley Clair Mitchell and Myself (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953), 86; Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899; reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1953) and “The Limitations of Marginal Utility,” Journal of Political Economy 17 (November 1909), 622, 624. On Veblen see Rick Tilman, Thorstein Veblen and His Critics, 1891–1963 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
6. C. Wright Mills of Columbia University wrote this in his introduction to Veblen’s own The Theory of the Leisure Class, ix.
7. Frank Knight, “The Newer Economics and the Control of Economic Activity,” Journal of Political Economy (August 1932), 458; Chicago Tribune, May 28, 1972; Frank Knight, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921).
8. Frank Knight, The Economic Organization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933).
9. W. C. Allee, “Evolution of a Mechanist,” circa 1915, 9–11, quoted in Gregg Mitman, The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900–1950 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 52. Mitman’s book is the best study of Allee and Chicago ecology.
10. Karl Patterson Schmidt, “Warder Clyde Allee,” Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences USA 30 (1957), 3–40; Alfred E. Emerson and Thomas Park, “Warder Clyde Allee: Ecologist and Ethologist,” Science 121 (May 13, 1955), 686–87; David W. Blight, Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2002); on Earlham see Thomas Hamm, “A Brief History of Earlham College,” at the school’s Web site: www.earlham.edu/EC_history.html.
11. Warder Clyde Allee, “An Experimental Analysis of the Relation Between Physiological States and Rheotaxis in Isopoda,” Journal of Experimental Zoology 13 (1912), 270–344; Mitman, The State of Nature, 53.
12. Springfield News-Record, February 9, 1917, quoted in Mitman, The State of Nature, 56.
13. See ibid., 58–62.
14. Peter Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 10; Oren Harman, “On the Power of Ideas,” Minerva 45 (2007), 175–189. Many American biologists connected German militarism to Darwinism. See Mitman, The State of Nature, 220, n36.
15. Quotes from Mitman, The State of Nature, 60.
16. On Spencer see Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 234–330.
17. Blair, “Passing of a Great Mind.”
18. Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 22, 21, 24. See also Stanislaw Ulam, “John von Neumann, 1903–1957,” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 64, no. 3 (May 1958), 1–49.
19. John von Neumann, “Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftspiele,” Mathematische Annalen 100 (1928), 295–320. See Robert J. Leonard, “From Parlor Games to Social Science: Von Neumann, Morgenstern and the Creation of Game Theory, 1928–1944,” Journal of Economic Literature 33 (1995), 730–61.
20. John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: Macmillan 2007; 1936), 3.
21. Hyman Minsky, John Maynard Keynes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975); GeoffTily, Keynes’s General Theory, the Rate of Interest and “Keynesian” Economics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
22. Don Patinkin, Essay On and In the Chicago Tradition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981), 299; Leonard Silk, The Economists (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 46; Henry Simons, A Positive Program for Laissez-Faire: Some Proposals for a Liberal Economic Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934); Craufurd D. Goodwin, “Martin Bronfenbrenner, 1914–1997,” Economic Journal (November 1998), 1776.
23. Jacob Viner, “Mr. Keynes and the Causes of Unemployment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 1936; Johan Van Overtveldt, The Chicago School: How the University of Chicago Assembled the Thinkers Who Revolutionized Economics and Business (Canada: B2 Books, 2007), 81. Van Overtveldt provides a thorough overview of the rise of the Chicago School.
24. Edward O. Wilson and Charles D. Michener, “Alfred Edward Emerson, 1896–1976,” Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences USA 53 (1982), 159–77, 162. Emerson’s collection was donated to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
25. Sewall Wright, “Genetics of Abnormal Growth in the Guinea Pig,” Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology 2 (1934), 137–47, quote on 139. On Wright see William Provine, Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
26. For an up-to-date, modern appreciation of the idea of the superorganism see Bert Hlldobler and E. O. Wilson, The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).
27. See William Morton Wheeler, The Social Insects (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1928), and “Animal Societies,” Scientific Monthly 39 (1934), 289–301.
28. Alfred E. Emerson, “Biological Basis of Social Cooperation,” Illinois Academy of Science Transactions 39 (1946), 12, quoted in Mitman, The State of Nature, 158.
29. Frank Lillie, “The Department of Biology in Relation to the New Organization,” Daily Maroon, December 11, 1930; Warder Clyde Allee, “Science Confirms an Old Faith,” American Friend 35 (1928), 780. Quoted in Mitman, 52.
30. See Warder Clyde Allee, “Animal Aggregations,” Quarterly Review of Biology 2 (1927), 367–98, and Animal Aggregations: A Study in General Sociology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1927).
31. A good description of Allee’s aggregation work appears in Dugatkin, The Altruism Equation, 41–50.
32. W. C. Allee, “Concerning Biology and Biologists,” quoted in ibid., 57.
33. W. C. Allee, “Reexamination of One Fundamental Doctrine in the Light of Modern Knowledge,” and “Where Angels Fear to Tread,” quoted in ibid., 48, 56.
34. Oskar Morgenstern, Diary, April–May 1942, quoted in Leonard, “From Parlor Games to Social Science,” 730.
35. John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1944), 2.
36. Van Overveldt, The Chicago School, 215. Many of the professors at the Chicago Department of Economics did not endorse the research methods used at the Cowles Commission. All, however, considered von Neumann a genius.
37. Actually, game theory as Neumann and Morgenstern had defined it was probably least applicable to economics compared to other fields: Zero-sum games between two people are negligible in economic situations, whereas cooperative, many-people games were not strictly solved in the book. That would have to wait for John Nash.
38. Mitman, The State of Nature, 159.