The Price of Altruism (34 page)

The same was true for Moses and Jesus. At any given moment they could have exercised their own free will and departed from God’s design. But of course they didn’t.

Minus the miracles, Hamilton thought George’s Passion schedule mirrored his best work in evolutionary theory. In his irreverent humor toward authority and the church, he offered that it was not at all surprising that George had come up with a better Passion schedule than anyone else in eighteen centuries; after all, he had the advantage of not having gone to theological seminary. But George disagreed. Theological training had not prevented the most extreme heretical opinions from developing, as proved abundantly by the historical record, so why should it prevent smaller deviations like the one he was proposing? Nor could this be just a matter of enough time passing, as with scientific discoveries: After all, the ancients were better versed in Aramaic and Greek, not to mention the intricacies of the lunar calendar and dating. Moderns had no advantage over past exegetes when it came to figuring out the last week of Christ.

Playing devil’s advocate, George offered another possibility:

Intelligence couldn’t be the reason; even Isaac Newton, for God’s sake, had dabbled in Biblical exegesis and come up short. If anything, George had been at a disadvantage: He had been less familiar with the Bible before his conversion than with the poetry of Shelley and Byron, and was naturally appalling in foreign languages to boot. How could he compare, say, to William Whiston, Newton’s successor as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a known geologist and biblical scholar versed in ancient tongues, who had translated Josephus and many early Christian documents?

The answer was clear. Sporting a silver cross on his lapel now, he wrote triumphantly to his daughter Annamarie: “Your father has surpassed many famous and brilliant men such as Sir Isaac Newton…and St. Augustine and a multitude of others and solved one of the great problems of all time.” He had been chosen by God, there was no other explanation. For the Bible had been “supernaturally constructed so that various forms of sin would form various forms of blindness.” Extreme hate, for example, would lead readers of Revelation 13:18 to view whomever they despise as the Antichrist, instead of the true meaning of 666. Misinterpretations about Jacob were caused by gluttony, misinterpretations of the Passion schedule by conceit. For some reason, at this time, George had been sent to reveal these truths to the world. He didn’t know why but it was God’s design.
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That Hamilton examine his Passion schedule carefully was therefore all the more crucial. It wouldn’t take him all that long; it was much less technical and mathematical than most scientific papers he’d surely not think twice about reading. But it was important that
he
, more than anyone, have a serious look. “Even though you don’t share my beliefs about Jesus and the Gospels,” George explained,

It was a matter of great importance to humanity, George implored, a challenge Hamilton could not refuse. “I think that if you try this you will presently discover that more than human intelligence has gone into the composition of the Gospels.” Laying it out plainly, George concluded with an astonishing revelation: “There is an extraordinary concealment cipher there that has remained largely unread for 18+ centuries.”
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If God had opened his eyes to great truths in the Gospels, he was opening them too to great truths in science. Recently he had resent his revised big paper “The Nature of Selection” to
Science
. But there was something else he’d been working on too. R. A. Fisher’s fundamental theorem of natural selection hadn’t been a mystery for eighteen centuries, but nonetheless had baffled all students of evolution for the better half of the century. Just as he was constructing the Passion schedule, George decided to crack Fisher’s mathematics.

The fundamental theorem, Fisher had always claimed, was the biological analog to the second law of thermodynamics: “The rate of increase in fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time.” To the Anglican Fisher it was the ultimate reply to the winding down of the universe, God’s benevolent reply to his own disconcerting law of entropy. What it seemed to mean to students of Fisher trying to fathom the pride of place he had granted it was that, left to its devices, natural selection would always tend to increase the fitness of a population. Combating the tendency to disorder, it was the ultimate device of progress.
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But how Fisher had derived this result mathematically no one seemed to understand. Some called it “recondite,” others “very difficult,” still others “entirely obscure.” Most thought the theorem only held under very special, circumscribed conditions, like asexuality and random pairing, and that the great Fisher had therefore been mistaken. Recently Fisher’s own successor at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge had intimated that his teacher might have been exactly correct, if only we could understand what he meant.
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“Fisher’s explanations of his theorem,” George now wrote in drafts of “Fisher’s ‘Fundamental Theorem’ Made Clear,” “are afflicted by a truly astonishing number of obscurities, infelicities of expression, typographical errors, omissions of crucial explanations and contradictions.” But Fisher, he thought, could not easily be accused of error. Carefully considering language, comparing words, and squinting at the mystifying mathematical notation, George now gradually began to see, as if looking through a crystal, precisely what Fisher had meant.
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He had just penned a letter to Henry Morris, the Texan founder of the Creation Research Science Center, who was known to Americans as “the father of modern creationism.” A young earth creationist and a biblical literalist, Morris was the evangelical author of
The Genesis Flood,
and George was writing to congratulate him on his enterprise. Morris was surprised and delighted to hear such compliments, and from the author of “Science and the Supernatural” no less. Soon, however, even he was taken aback by George’s fundamentalism.
⁵¹
“I am very much in sympathy with the claims of the society,” George wrote to him,

Morris replied politely that he was sorry. Short of membership, though, he offered a subscription to the society’s journal. “I am afraid that you did not fully understand the tenor of my letter,” George’s surprising retort soon followed:

No reply was forthcoming to George’s letter, the rest of which degenerated into a diatribe against pseudo-Christians like Morris and his like who ask only for God’s guidance instead of his strict commands. Nor, for that matter, was there a reply from Rosemarie, to whom George continued writing increasingly disturbing letters, the last of which asked her to pray “Bless me, Father, for I am on the road to hell,” and signed off, “sincerely His.”
⁵⁴

But as George grew crazier and crazier to the world, his scientific insight only sharpened. At the precise time he was debating with the “father of creationism” whether the biblical flood had been worldwide or only local, he was penetrating the thought of the twentieth century’s greatest evolutionary sage. He’d been sending drafts of “Fisher’s ‘Fundamental Theorem’ Made Clear” to Cedric Smith for approval, and CABS had now decided to run it as the cover article in the
Annals of Human Genetics
. It was going to make a big splash. Once again this was no coincidence. “I’ve developed a considerable interest in trying to solve puzzles about Bible interpretation,” George wrote to his friend Ludwig Luft in America. “It is possible that this involves some of the same abilities as are needed for interpreting what Fisher wrote on his theorem.”
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All of Fisher’s followers had tried their hand at it, but it was George who cracked the mystery. Back in the early part of the century, Fisher had been the one to develop the notion of “variance.” Variation in a population was due both to genes and to environment, for genetics might react differently in different environments, producing two distinct phenotypes based on the very same genes. What Fisher’s mathematical definition of “variance” allowed scientists to do was to distinguish what part of the variation in a population was due to genes and what part was due to environment. Students of heredity with a determinist cast of mind would later use this concept to claim the supremacy of heredity over environment in the passing down of intelligence, but seeking out a general law, Fisher himself used it to construct the fundamental theorem. The principal misunderstanding had been that Fisher was talking about “total” fitness. In fact what he had claimed was that selection working on that portion of the variance that could be ascribed to discrete, “additive” (noninteracting) genes would always increase fitness, and that the rate of increase of fitness would be proportional to the rate of variation. The theorem classified everything outside of “additive” genetic variance—including epistasis (interaction between genes), dominance of genes over one another, as well as the truly nongenetic domain—as “environment.” Fisher’s fundamental theorem referred not to “total” fitness but only to the specifically additive, genetic part of it.

But if selection would always produce genes that were optimally adaptive, they could only be optimally adaptive to conditions that existed an instant earlier; the “environment” was constantly changing.
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The total fitness of a population could therefore go down as well as up, it all depended on the “fit” of heredity and the outside world. In the battle between chance and necessity, then, genes were like agents of progress running blindly after whimsical masters. What George was able to show was that this statement was precisely true: Statistically speaking, genes would invariably become more adaptive over time, pushing their bearers to ever-growing heights. “Heights,” however, could only be defined retroactively.
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There was a salutary lesson in this belated penetration. Fisher had believed that the true motor of evolution was selection working on discrete, “additive” genetic variance. Just as the theory of gases could predict outcomes based on the behavior of discrete molecules bumping about in a flask, his theory of selection could predict the fate of populations based on the behavior of their genes. He had yearned for a deep truth, an antidote in God’s living world to the second law in His inanimate. What George now saw was that things were more complicated: Perhaps the fundamental theorem was the best we could yet describe, the most general law of life and its course. But it was fundamental only within its circumscribed boundary. Success or failure, elevation or denouement, ultimately depended on more than just the discrete particles within. It was how they interacted with the environment that mattered for overall fitness. Progress could be guaranteed only if inside and outside lived in harmony.
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It was the end of 1971, and Hamilton and his family were recovering from the loss of Romilda and Godofredo. “One does really develop parental feelings towards such fosterlings,” Bill tried to explain in a melancholy philosophical letter to George, “and yet at the same time one doesn’t completely.” When Godo, the younger of the two, began to forget his true parents, and Romilda to engage in amorous affairs, there was no recourse but to send them back home to Brazil. Biology, in the end, was stronger than anything.
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