The Price of Altruism (29 page)

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?”
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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:

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 tragedy 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

When it came to the evolution of man, it seemed obvious to George that group selection must have played a role. Early humans had lived in groups, and cultural inheritance could have gone a long way in preserving the kinds of genetic behavioral differences that would otherwise be swamped by migration.

Huxley, Kropotkin, Allee, Wynne-Edwards, Emerson, Fisher, Wright, JBS, Maynard Smith—he read them all and more. Every one was occupied with the question of the unit of selection and every one seemed to have an answer. Still, was it conceivable that each held a portion of the truth, that none was entirely right but none entirely wrong, either? Could the same kinds of economic mechanisms Hardin argued were necessary to square the individual and common good exist, biologically, in nature? Could it be, in other words, as Darwin had noticed when contemplating the ants, that selection worked on different levels
simultaneously
?

At the end of April he said his good-byes to Alice, arranged for Miss McCartney’s eviction, closed up the old apartment, and got on a plane. Back at UCL, Cedric Smith was pushing him to complete a grant proposal to the Science Research Council. Classical theory, CABS wrote in his report, assumed that each individual possesses a “fitness” independent of the “fitnesses” of others, and that by analyzing the situation mathematically, the course of the evolution of a population can be predicted. This was a good approximation of reality in some situations, as when an inherited disease shortens life, but where the interaction between individuals plays an important role in determining their fate it simply wasn’t good enough. Sexual selection, parental care, formation of families and communities: All were situations in which conflict and cooperation were paramount. Interaction, not singularity, was the name of the game, and few besides Fisher and Hamilton had ever played it. “Dr. Price has come to the subject comparatively recently,” Smith wrote almost apologetically, adding, “I have however been greatly impressed by his ability.”
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For George, meanwhile, little had changed. “I continue to have the plan of limiting my life span to about 50 years,” he wrote to Tatiana.
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Soon after, the news came that the SRC had awarded him a three-year grant effective July 1, 1969. Walking home from UCL to the flat on Little Titchfield, he eyed the spire at All Souls. The only passion that remained in him was to crack the mystery of the evolution of family—that and exacting revenge on Ferguson.

A few days later Alice died peacefully in New York.

Back in February, before leaving for New York, George heard a talk delivered at the Royal Society of Medicine by a psychiatrist from Maudsley Hospital named John Price. “The other Price” as he became known, had been interested, too, in ritualized animal combat: If there was no physical pain or incapacity, what made animals yield to the winner? Price’s idea was that ritual yielding is subserved by mental incapacity and mental pain, and that human depression and anxiety—both painful and incapacitating—might have evolved from it. The notion was attractive to a clinical psychiatrist: It suggested a wealth of animal models for the study of human neurosis as well as a battery of new ideas for prophylaxis and treatment.
⁵¹

Most important to George, though, was the gamelike logic behind the claim. Why, in fact, should there be any variation in yielding behavior? In terms of the group the answer was obvious: The greater the variation of yielding tendency in the population, the greater the chances that any two contestants are unevenly matched, and the shorter the duration of battles. If selection between groups had been important in evolution, groups with shorter spats would have surely done better than those with costly, protracted encounters.

But variation in yielding behavior could also favor the individual, as “the other Price” explained:

It was precisely the same notion George had come up with in his paper on antlers, and it hinged on the logic of games. Hardin had shown that there was often conflict between individual interest and the common good, and von Neumann that you couldn’t maximize simultaneously for two variables. And yet even here, where the individual interest and common good seemed to correspond, George saw no reason why natural selection couldn’t be working on both at the same time. An “outsider” untrained in evolutionary theory, he really had no reason to choose sides: Why limit the scope of Darwin’s theory? The only relevant question, it seemed to him, was not whether selection was working on the individual or the group, but how, in each and every case, to tell which force was stronger.