The Price of Altruism (12 page)

When his entomologist friend E. B. Poulton told him that most butterflies, like the monarch, have bodies tough enough to survive a bird’s first bite, it looked as if the problem went away: If the monarch could survive the initial munch, its distastefulness would mercifully save it. But what about monarch caterpillars? They had “nauseous flavors,” too, and yet were as soft as silk. If a bird took a chomp out of one of them, no matter how distasteful, the defense would have been too little too late.

The answer resided in the family. Before caterpillars grow wings they are less mobile and tend to stick together, usually in groups of related kin. If a hungry bird looking for a meal chanced on such a clump it might take a bite out of one but spare the rest, disgusted. The unlucky caterpillar would have sacrificed itself for its brothers and sisters, losing its life in a final act of gallant altruism.

It made sense, Fisher thought, because kin are genetically related: Natural selection could produce kamikaze distastefulness in individuals to ensure that more of their shared genes lived on in the bodies of the brothers and sisters who were spared. The less related the caterpillars in the clump, the more the selective effect “will be diluted,” and the less chances of altruism to evolve.
⁵²

The importance of relatedness had been clear to Fisher as far back as 1918, when he presented in his famous paper a table calculating genetic distances between kin. But it was Sewall Wright, four years later, who provided the variable that was adopted to measure kinship.
⁵³
He called it the “coefficient of relationship,” or
r
, and proved that for an individual and any of its direct descendants it was equal to 0.5
ⁿ
where
n
is the number of generations that separate the two. Between mother and son it equals 0.5 (0.51), between grandparent and grandchild 0.25 (0.52) and so on.
r
was the measurer of genetic relatedness—the probability that two individuals shared a common gene. More generally, then, Wright could now calculate the
r
of any two related individuals, not just those who were direct ancestors and descendants.

Figuring out the
r
of two maternal cousins, for example, worked like this: Calculate the probability that both possess a gene, A, that they inherited from their maternal grandmother (for each cousin separately this equals 0.52, meaning that together the probability is 0.52 x 0.52 = 0.0625). Then employ the same procedure to calculate the probability that both cousins got gene A via their maternal grandfather, which likewise equals 0.0625. Finally, add the two sums to get the probability that the cousins share gene A from either of their maternal grandparents (0.0625 + 0.0625 = 0.125). Two maternal cousins, that is, have an
r
of 1/8, or a one in eight chance of sharing a gene inherited through their maternal grandparents.
⁵⁴

Even though it would one day prove a key to solving the conundrum, Wright never applied
r
to the problem of altruism. Instead, more than twenty years later, in 1945, he offered a theoretical model of the evolution of altruism that paid little heed to relatedness. Once again random drift was at the crux.
⁵⁵

By definition altruistic traits reduce fitness, and are therefore bad for the individual. But imagine a mixed population of altruists and selfish folk marching together down Main Street: If, just by chance, a bunch of altruists exclusively got sidetracked into an alley, they would make it to Town Hall quicker than the rest of the group. The reason would be that they’d all be helping one another rather than some of them competing to get there first, as would be the case on Main Street. The remaining altruists on Main Street, on the other hand, would not fare as well, since while they were taking time to help others walk down to the destination, the selfish folk would be speeding down to Town Hall.

Within a mixed group, that is, an altruist would suffer from
intergroup
competition at the hands of those out for themselves, but between, or
intragroup,
competition would favor groups with a greater proportion of altruists. In terms of the adaptive landscape, if altruists were blown off different peaks and somehow found themselves all grouped at the foot of the same mountain, they might start an ascent that would place them on the highest peak of all.

Wright’s model depended on “group selection,” on natural selection sometimes weeding out or favoring whole groups rather than individuals. But while it made sense that groups with more altruists would do better than groups with fewer, the math proved a problem: It would work only if the alleyways were almost completely isolated from one another, which in turn made it very difficult for altruists to stumble into them by chance. Naturalists, as opposed to pen-and-paper men like Wright, knew that such stringent conditions would be tough to find in nature.
⁵⁶

Where Fisher turned to caterpillars, and Wright to isolated groups and drift, Haldane looked to the ruminants for his stab at the natural origins of kindness. “Of two female deer,” he wrote in an essay from 1928, “the one which habitually abandons its young on the approach of a beast of prey is likely to outlive the one which defends them; but as the latter will leave more offspring, her type survives, even if she loses her life.”
⁵⁷
The logic of selection was often cruel but always plain.

Still, what did distasteful caterpillars and protective mother deer have to do with humans? Could the very same animal logic pertain to man?

However much he believed in worker solidarity, Haldane was a lover of mankind who trusted no one. He agreed with Fisher that evolutionarily speaking, altruism was a family affair. “I doubt if man contains many genes making for altruism of a general kind,” he wrote, “though we probably do possess an innate predisposition to family life…. For insofar as it makes for the survival of one’s descendants and near relations, altruistic behavior is a kind of Darwinian fitness, and may be expected to spread as a result of natural selection.”
⁵⁸

Remembering his brother, Fisher agreed. After all, the hero might lose his life in battle, but his heroism would survive. The reason was that it was coded in his genes. Since relatives share genes, and since, “by repute and prestige,” the act of valor confers an advantage on the family, the grieving but proud surviving kin will pass “hero genes” along in greater numbers.
⁵⁹
Alwyn’s sacrifice in Flanders had not been in vain: Fisher’s eight children with Nicolette would make sure of that.

Whether he had carried his aristocratic sensibility into the realm of determinist genetics or the other way around, a man was the sum of his genes. It was a sentiment Haldane could warm to, however far he lay from Fisher on the political spectrum. “Let us suppose,” JBS wrote, fleshing out the argument,

He then added, with his usual mix of bravado and wit: “But on the two occasions when I have pulled possibly drowning people out of the water (at an infinitesimal risk to myself) I had no time to make such calculations.”
⁶¹

Haldane’s wit aside, a generalized mathematical model was still lacking. To truly assert itself—Fisher, Haldane, and Wright’s prodigious talents notwithstanding—the evolution of kindness would have to wait for a new champion.
⁶²
Still, relatedness had met altruism, for the benefit of the drowning, scaling the political gamut where ideology had failed. Huxley aside, not to mention organized religion, altruism was an offspring of evolution. It was a breathtaking notion. Legend had it that Haldane had first described its logic stooped drunk over a beer in London: “I’ll jump into a river for two brothers and eight cousins,” he was said to have blurted out just before collapsing on the bar.
⁶³

Fisher was knighted in 1952, and sought a quiet retirement in Australia. After the war friends and colleagues at Cambridge wondered about his friendship with Mussolini’s former demographic adviser, Corrado Gini, and with Otmar von Verschuer, a medical geneticist and “one of the most dangerous Nazi activists of the Third Reich.”
⁶⁴
He was a strange bird, Fisher—aloof, exacting, imperious, oblivious; too reactionary, people said, to be either a Nazi or a fascist. Instead, he went to his grave an apostle of Nature. It was she who knew what was best for mankind.

Haldane, meanwhile, sank deeper into the Lysenkoist bog.
⁶⁵
It was official now: genetics had been banned in the Soviet Union, Vavilov brutally murdered in the Gulag; science and justice were not marching hand in hand. Vain and obstinate, JBS continued to offer disclaimers while quietly stopping to pay his Party dues. When all was said and done, he was a scientist.

He was looking for a gracious exit. When Britain joined France and Israel in attacking Egypt as it nationalized the Suez Canal, he found his pretext at long last. To the provost of University College he announced that he no longer wished to be a subject of a state “guilty of aggression by the overwhelming verdict of the human race.” It was 1957, and the old soldier was moving to India, where peace and kindness were a philosophy.
⁶⁶

To those who knew both men well the irony must have been biting. They had both perceived the relation of kinship to valor, that being able to pass on goodness depends on having children. Fisher, unbattleworthy, had sired a veritable clan. But waving good-bye to England as he got on the plane, Haldane was leaving no one behind. Nor, despite a desire more burning than any other passion, would he ever become a father.

George and Julia Price in Washington Square, New York City, 1947

George, Julia, Annamarie, and Kathleen—Morristown, New Jersey, 1949

A
t 7:30 p.m. September 20, 1940, the new freshmen shuffled into the Union at Memorial Hall. With Dean Chase presiding, the Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, followed by the chairman of the Committee on Admission, followed by John H. Finley, Jr., associate professor of Greek and Latin, each extended their blessings and articulated their thoughts. It was a long evening, but the boys listened in silence. They were the Harvard class of 1944, America’s “best and brightest,” and by every account of those present at matriculation, its very future and hope.
¹

The college had been named for John Harvard in 1636, but in truth he was merely a generous fellow who had donated his library and a sum of money. There had been no single founder when the Massachusetts legislature, long before there was a nation, created it of the community, by the community and for the community. Its “duty, or in Protestant terms, its task,” was to serve the ambitions of American society, capitalism, and democracy. Now, in the fall of 1940, as the winds of war began to blow westward across the Atlantic, the freshman class had for the first time in history been augmented above the regular one thousand, to “take care of any possible vacancies” in case of a draft or voluntary enlistment. To accommodate the increased number of freshmen, the college opened a new dormitory at 24 Quincy Street, just across the street from the Yard. It was there, at Farlow House, that George Price settled into his new digs.
²

Figuring that he was a Stuyvesant boy and therefore cleverer than the rest, George enrolled in advanced graduate courses in chemistry and biology, as well as in German A even though his talent for languages was appalling. The gamble backfired, and he was struggling. To well-groomed boys in his year, like future economist Lloyd Shapley from Exeter and future philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn from Taft, everything seemed to come easy. Cocksure upon arrival, he increasingly became reclusive, and, like many another freshman from the public schools, began to wonder if Harvard had made a mistake.
³

Wartime tumult on the campus made keeping his mind on his work an even greater task. At graduation earlier in the spring, the Ivy Orator was booed by the seniors when he said something about America’s not being “too proud to fight.” Returning after the summer with France surrendered and London bombed, faculty and students were changing their tone, increasingly calling for intervention. They were led by Harvard’s president, James Bryant Conant, the chemist, who on every possible occasion would remind his company that “fear of war is no basis for a national policy.” The “American Defense, Harvard Group,” headed by Ralph Barton Perry, professor of philosophy, operated from the top floor of Widener Library. With more than six hundred faculty on board it carried much weight both in the college and in the national press, helping to house British refugee children in America and calling to fight fascism and tyranny in Europe.

Others of opposite disposition organized themselves in the Committee for Democratic Action and echoed the isolationist call to “Stay out of the war!” Already President Roosevelt had called for fifty thousand planes to make America the “arsenal of democracy,” and the Civil Aeronautics Authority, a branch of the federal government, had announced that it would train fifty to one hundred Harvard students to be pilots at the cost of only forty dollars a year. Courses in navy and military science at the college were overflowing. And, starting on October 16, undergraduates twenty-one and over began to pour through the Widener Reading Room, signing cards and answering questions in registration for the draft.
⁴

In December isolationists and pacifists led by Professor William Yandell Elliott and Lloyd’s famous astronomer father, Harlow Shapley, met at Emerson Hall to protest the “imperialist” war in Europe. Outside, hundreds of students formed a picket line, shooting red flares into the sky and singing “There’ll Always Be an England.” A war of signs now raged in the Yard: “Books! Not Guns!” and “Why Fight in Europe? Strike for Peace” intermingling uneasily with “Liberty before Peace” and “War is Hell, Hitler is Worse!” Activists offered passersby a tongue-in-cheek choice between an American flag and a swastika. At the Harvard Students Union, bitter debates raged over Congress’s Lend-Lease Bill, which interventionists called “cowardly” for representing “aid short of war.”
⁵

President Roosevelt signed the bill on March 12, and, one student remembered, “Harvard took a deep breath and waited.” As George was vying for the 165 pound spot on the wrestling team and beginning to fathom that his grades might not satisfy his scholarship conditions, the world outside was reeling. A wave of strikes in defense industries swept the nation, British forces were defeated in Egypt and Greece, and America hesitated on the brink of sending out U.S. convoys across a U-boat-infested Atlantic.

On account of his poor eyesight George had been classified 4F, and would not be joining the armed forces. Nor would he be continuing at Harvard; a few poor grades prevented the scholarship from being renewed. Its unofficial poet, David McCord, might have been giving his thoughts expression:

In May, disappointed and cowed, George left Farlow House and went back home to New York City. That summer Alice traveled to visit her family in the Midwest, and the Price brothers were left to run business at Display. Since he was “supposed to be the more dependable,” George was managing the money, and having a hell of a time fighting off creditors.
⁸
Still, on account of his strong Stuyvesant performance and Harvard credits, he was accepted with a scholarship as a Home Study sophomore at the University of Chicago. Things were looking up. Then fall came, and winter, and on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, the surprise attack by the Japanese on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. Finally America was at war.

The year 1887 wasn’t a good one for John D. Rockefeller. The founder of Standard Oil, and America’s most powerful magnate, he looked around him and sighed. Congress had just passed the Interstate Commerce Act, clamping regulation on the big boys by making secret rebates and price discrimination illegal. Capitalism just wasn’t what it used to be.

A major philanthropic enterprise seemed a welcome diversion. Baptist congregations had been growing like wildfire in the Midwest, and business, too, was growing. What was missing was a house of learning to rival the great Ivys of the East, to fashion the Midwest a true alternative to Washington, New York, and Boston. And so, when Chicago clergy approached him, the wealthiest Baptist layman in the land agreed to contribute to the founding of a university. Chicago’s leading merchant, Marshall Field, donated the site on the Midway. The “Wunderkind” William Rainey Harper, Hebrew scholar and workhorse extraordinaire, was secured as first president. By 1892 the gates were open. Rome was not built in one day, people said. The University of Chicago almost was.
⁹

Harper sought to bring together the attributes of Oxbridge and the great German universities: to combine undergraduate and graduate, teaching and research, all at the very highest level. “The times are asking not merely for men to harness electricity and sound,” he declared at commencement, “but for men to guide us in complex economic and social duties.” Scholarship would be a “matter of the gravest moment,” mere fact-finding frowned upon in favor of knowledge applied. If not Rome, then like Athens at the zenith of its glory, the University of Chicago would be a republic.
¹⁰

Many experts were sure the experiment would fail. It would be a “veritable monstrosity,” they said, a Midwestern “Harper’s Bazaar.” Not if he could help it. Born to a Scottish-Irish family that ran a general store in New Concord, Ohio, the first president was a genius salesman. With Rockefeller’s dollars in hand, he went to work shamelessly robbing Yale, Harvard, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins of their very best men. Chicago was looking for “home runs.” By 1910 Rockefeller had spent $35 million building the university. Senator Jonathan Dolliver of Iowa didn’t like it. “The University of Chicago,” he complained, “smelled of oil like a Kansas town.” His objection went unheeded. Intellectual gravitas had soon become the distinctive mark of the university. A new titan of education had been born.
¹¹

“There is a right and wrong way,” the
University of Chicago Magazine
declared,

By the time George arrived on campus in January 1942, the University of Chicago was like a military anthill. Cadets from the Army Signal Corps bumped into U.S. Public Health Service nurses. In all colors of uniform—army, navy, air force, Red Cross—and at any given time, five thousand men and women could be seen scurrying across the Quadrangles. The Institute for Military Study had already been running since October 1940, preparing more than two thousand students and civilians. At the Institute of Meteorology all the army, navy and civilian meteorologists in the country were now being trained and sent to service. Bartlett Gymnasium, Sunny Gymnasium, and the men’s residence halls had been turned over to the navy; its radiomen and signalmen were now in training at the university and would need the accommodation.
¹³
More than one hundred contracts with the federal government were signed, involving thousands of men and millions of dollars. Even Norman Maclean, assistant professor of English (and former forest ranger) had traded in Shakespeare for shooting, and was teaching an advanced course in rifle marksmanship.
¹⁴

For some the onslaught of the armed forces was not all bad: The meteorology cadet Charles Hlad just happened to hold the world record in the high hurdle and led a traditionally weak Chicago side to three surprising victories at the start of the track season. But even though the old-timers at Stagg Field got a kick out of their opponents’ bewilderment, for most the “extinction of the civilians” seemed a glum, uninvited affair.
¹⁵

And so, when President Robert Maynard Hutchins stood before those present at the twenty-second annual trustees’ dinner, he stated what to students and faculty was already obvious: “We are now engaged in total war,” the commanding six-foot-three-inch former dean of the Yale Law School declared. “Total war may mean the total extinction, for the time being, at least, of the characteristic functions of the University of Chicago. I say this as flatly and crudely as I can…. We are now an instrumentality of total war.”
¹⁶

More than developing new theories in ecology or economics, the university, President Hutchins explained, was now in “service of the nation and the world.” With the combination of the year-round quarter system and the scheme to award bachelor’s degrees in the sophomore year to students who had started their studies as juniors in high school, the wartime necessity of “speeding up” education presented no problem at Chicago. It did mean, however, that in addition to the military presence there were hundreds of underclassmen scurrying about the halls.
¹⁷

Many of the freshers must have been left speechless by the annual senior Mustache Race, which began that winter. A school tradition for more than twenty-five years, it consisted of the shaving on February 20 of the aspiring candidates, and judgment on March 5, by Brad, proprietor of the Reynolds Club Barber Shop, of the man (or woman) who had sprouted the most magnificent mustache. The annual Botany Pond Brawl, “theoretically” featuring a tug of war in the shallow algae-infested body of water lying behind the Botany Building—but always degenerating into a wild free-for-all—followed soon after the Mustache Race. Underclassmen might have been careful, too, where they rested their bottoms. “Dire penalties await the cynic,” the school newspaper warned regarding the C Bench in front of Cobb Hall, “who defies tradition to park his worthless carcass on the Bench.” It was into this blend of custom and mayhem that George now arrived, trying to get serious once again about his studies.
¹⁸

Inorganic Chemistry: 231, Quantitative Analysis: 240, Vertebrate Zoology: 205, Chemical Thermodynamics: 361—he was packing in his science courses. In truth this fitted in well with the general war atmosphere at the university: Outside the mechanical, physical, and natural sciences, entire divisions in the humanities and social sciences were feeling sterile and superfluous. Technology and science were going to win the war; this seemed as clear as day to almost everyone. Luckily President Hutchins was there to remind them of the broader purpose.