The Price of Altruism (37 page)

John was very worried. “I have less faith than you do that the Lord will provide.
Please
let me know at once if I can help.” Hamilton too was urging his American friend to renew his fellowship. If George got evicted he was more than welcome at Berkshire. “If there is an Almighty I think you mistake his ways!”
²⁹

But neither Maynard Smith nor Hamilton understood the extent of the test George had put himself to, for it was far from just a matter of money. “It is now more than nine months since I last saw a doctor,” George wrote proudly to a friend back in May the previous year; when he was feeling unwell he’d go to pray at the London Healing Mission. Soon after his conversion he had stopped his periodic thyroid checkups. After all, the coincidences, the penetration of the Bible, the equation—all were signs that he’d been chosen for some task. If the Lord so wanted, the Lord would provide. By now it had been two years since he’d been to a doctor. Pushing fate, he’d begun to eat just as little as necessary and had survived for the last week on barely a pint of milk a day. But there was something worse, darkly more ominous: George had completely stopped taking his thyroid medicine.
³⁰

It was a neighbor from Little Titchfield, Mr. Wood, who found him, collapsed, in the stairway and rushed him to the hospital teetering on the brink of unconsciousness. Luckily an alert physician at the Middlesex ICU, Dr. Webb, noticed the deficiency in his thyroxine, and administered it intravenously while George lay asleep in bed. In most probability this was what saved him: With no corrective to his lack of thyroid hormone, his energy uptake and heart rate had reached such levels as to put his life in grave danger. George had been a heartbeat away from dying.

It was Christmas 1972, and he was recovering in the ward. His eyes were sore from the atropine, and when a patch was removed from one of them, it took awhile before he could stop seeing double. But most troubling at the moment was his imminently expiring visa. “If you say that I entered Middlesex Hospital in a state of ‘starvation,’” he subsequently wrote to Dr. Webb, whose explanations would be necessary, “they are likely to say, ‘Hah, he ran out of money, one of those American beatniks.’” George preferred that Dr. Webb write that he arrived in “a state of extreme bodily weakness” instead of “malnutrition.” Also, he thought that it would be better not to mention “myxedema”: Some immigration officer might know what that meant and wonder why he’d stopped taking his thyroid medication. Then he turned to the bigger picture: The reason he hadn’t renewed his grant, he’d explain, was because he was in the process of switching his career “from science to Christianity.”
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Finally, in January, release papers in hand, he was helped into a cab by Mr. Wood and was back in Little Titchfield. Weakened and shaky, he was doing his best to nurse himself back to health. “What is it that one does wrong in cooking rice that makes it stick together?” he wrote to Annamarie in sunny California.

He was fifty years old. Miraculously he’d survived the Lord’s test. But more than ever now he grasped what seemed to have escaped him for quite some time. He was pale and thin, his fingernails brittle and blackening. His brand of strict Christianity had obviously gotten him nowhere. In this world at least, obedience to God notwithstanding, George was utterly alone.

Hamilton’s rule,
r
B>C, was good for the family or at most, after George’s correction, to those who shared similar genes. But what about altruism between nongenetically related organisms? This, after all, had been the moralist’s concern throughout the ages, sacrifice among relations being a lesser riddle to spin. Recognizing the problem, the Judeo-Christian tradition exhorted its followers to “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” but Aristotle was more of a cynic. “The friendly feelings that we bear for another,” he wrote in his
Nichomachean Ethics
, “have arisen from the friendly feelings that we bear for ourselves.”
³³

Pagan thought was not the only hardened philosophy on the moralism block: Saint Thomas Aquinas took a surprisingly utilitarian position, arguing in the
Summa Theologia
that we should love ourselves more than our neighbors. His interpretation of the Pauline phrase was that we should seek the common good more than the private good since the common good is a more desirable good for the individual. David Hume, in
A Treatise of Human Nature
, may have spelled out at the age of twenty-six what the venerable medieval theologian was thinking: “I learn to do service to another, without bearing him any real kindness: because I foresee, that he will return my service, in expectation of another of the same kind, and in order to maintain the same correspondence of good offices with me or others.”
³⁴

In 1776, the year of Hume’s death, his Edinburgh neighbor the economist Adam Smith put it even more directly in
The Wealth of Nations
: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but the beggar chooses to depend chiefly on the benevolence of his fellow citizens.” Most succinct of all, however, was the Dutch-born English satirist Bernard de Mandeville, who in a couplet from 1714 wrote: “Thus every Part was full of Vice, / Yet the whole Mass a Paradise.”
³⁵

And so when a precocious son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants started his education at Harvard in the early 1960s, he had quite a philosophical tradition to build on. But Robert Trivers was not interested in biology—he wanted to be a lawyer—and it would take a breakdown (his mania took the form of staying up all night, night after night, reading Wittgenstein and finally collapsing) to bring him closer to the animal world. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Trivers took an illustrating course while recovering, and was hired to draw animals for a biology textbook. His mentor was Bill Drury, an Audubon ornithologist whom he learned to love and revere. “Bill and I were walking in the woods one day,” Trivers once recounted to a reporter, “and I told him that my first breakdown had been so painful that I had resolved that if I ever felt another one coming on, I would kill myself. Lately, however, I had changed my mind, and drawn up a list of 10 people I would kill first in that event. I wanted to know if this was going forwards or backwards. He thought for a while, then he said ‘Can I add three names to that list?’ That was his only comment.”
³⁶

With Drury’s encouragement, Trivers read Wynne-Edwards and David Lack, and wondered about group and individual selection. Then he signed up for a doctorate in zoology armed with a sturdy plan to study monkeys. But his adviser was a herpetologist, and pointed him to Jamaica and to lizards instead. “When I flew to Jamaica,” he remembered, “I took one look at the women and one look at the island and decided to become a lizard man if that’s what it took to go back there.”

Spending hours peering into the world of his lizards, like Hamilton and Maynard Smith (and Darwin before them), Trivers came to believe that behavior was as much a product of evolution as were eyes and ears and fingers and tails. Looking into bird warning calls and cleaning symbioses in fish he came to see, like Aquinas and Hume and Adam Smith and the Dutch poet before him, that self-sacrifice could serve one’s interest if the chance was better than decent that the good deed would someday be repaid. Following up on Hamilton, he wondered if altruism might evolve between nonkin. This depended on the rewards of cooperation outweighing the costs of conflict, on being able to remember encounters, and on coming into regular contact with one’s neighbors. The theory of “reciprocal altruism,” as he called his new invention, was modeled as a prisoner’s dilemma, even though the actual proof of it as an ESS would have to wait until Hamilton got his hands on it. Still, Trivers was able to show that iterated encounters between nonrelated “players” would produce cooperative behavior since, in the long run, this provided more gain to the individual. On the principle “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” benevolence could be born of self-seeking: If promised in return, altruism would actually pay.
³⁷

As Trivers continued to work on his models, across the Atlantic, Maynard Smith and an ailing George were putting the last touches to “The Logic of Animal Conflict.” Altruism was the opposite of conflict, just as spite was the negative of nepotism. But it bore a structural resemblance to pulling punches in a battle: The very same self-interested logic explained them both. On both sides of the Atlantic, game theory was being marshaled to bring home a century-old insight. Darwin (and Kropotkin) had been right, the “bulldog” Huxley notwithstanding: “Morality” (even if far from selfless) was an invention of Nature.

Meanwhile at UCL, Harry Harris and Cedric Smith were doing all they could to hold on to George. “The whole point of this application,” CABS wrote in a new grant application to the MRC that spring, with minimal cooperation from George,

Asking money from the government for someone like George took more than a share of explaining. He was unknown, had come from nowhere, and was now fifty years old. Besides, his requests and conditions were highly unusual. “I personally have been very impressed by the quality of Dr. Price’s ideas,” CABS continued. “But he tells me that for personal reasons he wishes to spend only about one year on the present project. The only way in which that would be practicable would seem to be through a grant to support him.” All too well aware of his customer, he added: “—failing that, he would presumably be compelled to look elsewhere for some quite different occupation.”
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CABS was nearer the truth than even he might have imagined. For soon after returning home from the hospital, spurred by a vision of Christ, George underwent a second conversion. Two years earlier he’d written to Hamilton that God’s greatest test to man was that of
agape
, or charity and love. Luckily there were other qualities that counted in the Lord’s eyes—like obedience and intellectual receptiveness—for, candidly admitting the truth to his friend, “it doesn’t look as though I can pass purely on the basis of agape.”
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But that was then. Now things were different. “Last February,” he wrote to Hamilton, explaining,

He was abandoning his biblical pursuits and reaching out to the world again. “I’d love to see you again, Bill,” he ended his letter to Hamilton. “You’re one of the people whose company I enjoy.” Pulling out childhood photos of his daughters, he wept in silence, alone in his flat. “Poor Annamarie,” he wrote to one of them, gazing at her picture:

He understood now, he wrote, that he had never really been a true Christian, believing in Christ intellectually but neglecting His teachings about mercy and humility. He was determined to make things right again. His first conversion had been brought about by coincidence and was “false.” This time it would be “real” and was all about love.