The Price of Altruism (47 page)

This was a matter of the gravest urgency; George was down and out, sickly and starving. His survival was at stake. If they couldn’t print the Easter schedule, could they perhaps offer him a job as a janitor? Hamilton wasn’t a religious man, but he would be eternally grateful.

George Price’s unmarked grave, covered by brush, left of the tombstone, Saint Pancras Cemetery, London, 2009

G
eorge Price killed himself sometime between January 5 and the morning of January 6, 1975. Shmulik Atia had been about to leave the squat to go to work washing dishes in a Hampstead restaurant when he saw an envelope someone had slipped beneath the padlocked door. Unable to read English, and figuring that it might be the dreaded eviction notice, he ran upstairs to show it to George. It was 7:00 a.m.

When he knocked on George’s door, he felt it give in a little. Pushing it farther into the room, his eyes pointed downward, he saw a strange dark purple film, cracked like parched earth, coating the linoleum floor. A strong smell attacked his nostrils. He pushed the door still farther in, now feeling the weight behind it. When the aperture reached a certain angle, the full gruesomeness of the sight unfolded before him: A lone bare bulb lit the room from midceiling. The gray walls were peeling. Apart from a table, a chair, and an unmade bed, there were ammunition boxes serving as furniture. Hundreds of pages were scattered about. The entire floor was covered in blood. The window was cracked, and a cold wind was blowing through it.

There on the floor, with his back leaning against the slightly opened door, wearing black pants, a blue-and-white pinstriped shirt, and a worn-out black jacket—all too big for his skin-and-bones frame, was George. Shmulik looked down onto him: His legs were splayed, his arms fallen to his sides. His eyes were shut and his head slumped forward, leaning slightly to the left. His right hand clutched a pair of medium-size, sharp tailor’s scissors, and the blood surrounding the gaping puncture wound in his neck pointed clearly to the site of injury. Shmulik wasn’t sure when it had happened, but running up in a panic to wake Asher on the third floor, he screamed in his native Hebrew: “George is dead! He’s dead! George is dead!!”
¹

Three days later Shmulik and Asher were called in by Scotland Yard. It was clear that George had taken his own life by puncturing his carotid, but, per protocol, there had to be a coroner’s inquest. A professor named Hamilton stood up to speak, and someone whispered that he was considered one of the world’s great evolutionary biologists. Hamilton said that George had been a guest in his house just a fortnight before the tragedy, and that he was perhaps the most brilliant thinker he had ever met. A handsome, well-dressed lady sobbed uncontrollably. Introduced as a BBC worker and a friend, she spoke of George as the most wondrous lover.
George
? Shmulik and Asher looked incredulously at each other. Could these people really be talking about
George
?
²

He had stopped taking his thyroid meds, the inquest concluded. Hamilton explained that in the past George had felt that this was the best way to find out in which direction God wanted him to turn; probably he’d been seeking His guidance again. But a psychiatrist, Dr. Christopher Lucas, had apparently seen him just days before; George had come in off the street sunken and depressed. Lucas explained that with George’s condition, erratic intake of thyroid medicine could have contributed to the despair. He was unsure, however, whether George might have suffered from the symptoms of schizophrenia.
³

There had been a note, the inquest found, from January 1, at 4 a.m. “I came to England to a new part of the world,” it read, “before I decided to kill myself.” There was another, from January 2: “To Whom It May Concern: I guess I’ve had it. George.” A third, addressed to Sylvia, was about how “pure” and “white” she was, about bringing her “shame and sorrow,” about how he had mocked love by wanting her in a way that wasn’t approved by the Lord. And then there was a fourth letter, one addressed “To my friends.” George had felt himself to be a burden on them, he wrote, ever in debt, ever making the wrong decisions. “It seems the tim [
sic
] has come,” he ended, “for me to go and meet my maker.”
⁴

On the day of the funeral at Saint Pancras Cemetery, the
Sennet
, London’s student paper, announced the news to the world: “A prominent genetics researcher at UC Hospital gave up everything, including his life, for his religious beliefs. Dr. George Price gave away all his money, clothes and possessions to homeless alcoholics and left his flat in Bloomsbury to live as a squatter in Drummond Street, Kentish Town. It was there that he was found dead. A respected scientific researcher, Dr. Price was convinced that he had a ‘hot line to Jesus.’”
⁵
Otherwise his death passed almost completely unnoticed.

That same day, after George was interred, Hamilton decided to visit the squat on his way home from the cemetery. The people from the American Consulate had already been there to pick up George’s effects, but from a telephone discussion with a Mr. Cresty at the consulate he had a hunch that more papers were left behind. “I regard his ideas of such originality and such significance for evolutionary theory,” Hamilton wrote to Edison, “that I believe that sometime someone may think it worthwhile to find out something more about him and wish to go through letters and papers with some care.” Then he added, “and of course the strange life he has led for the past few years makes it quite a story.”
⁶

As Hamilton approached, the atmosphere around Tolmers Square was electric. The pavement outside the building had been ripped up, and that very day the tenants of 164 Drummond Street had had an altercation with the men of Stock Conversion. There was shoving and cursing, and the police came around. Sympathy aside, every one knew that the clock was ticking and couldn’t be stopped. The building was due for demolition.

When he walked into George’s room, Bill could still feel the blood crackling on the linoleum floor beneath his shoes. The mattress was gone, and so too the electric heater. His hunch had been right. Eyeing the piles of unmarked newspapers, magazines, cuttings, and old computer programs, he collected what was left of the papers. He found “The Nature of Selection,” which had been rejected by
Science
, and some genetic polymorphism materials that CABS would soon help publish posthumously.
⁷

A great sadness welled in his chest; in the silence of the room it was clear now that a friend “almost like a second self” was gone. “I felt a very great kinship with him,” he wrote to Edison, “indeed apart from his rather private nature a feeling of intellectual redundancy in each other’s presence may have been part of the reason we didn’t meet more often.” Racked by guilt for not being able to save him, he would later lower himself in comparison: “Where I had sympathized with flowers and bracken ferns partly because there wasn’t much that I could be expected to do for them, making my sympathy cheap, he gave himself wholeheartedly to the crying children and homeless humans wandering the same streets.” Bill was not sure whether any other evolutionary biologist in the world saw the interest in George’s covariance equation in the way he did, but he wanted to believe that recognition for his achievement would come someday, however belatedly.
⁸

A few days later 164 Drummond Street was demolished. On March 11, 1975, eighty-one people living in twenty-six houses were handed summonses to appear at the High Court in ten days’ time. Stock Conversion’s threats were finally materializing.

With the help of Camden Council, the day in court was postponed to four weeks. Immediately the community galvanized. The printing press churned out leaflets, and Sylvia and Petal’s silk-printing studio churned out the posters: “Defend the Tolmers 81,” “Stop Levy Fight Eviction” there was even an invitation to a play at Leicester Square Theatre, beginning March 27: “Levy: He Will Tear Your Home Apart,” it said, promising “your senses will never be the same.”
⁹

Finally the day in court arrived. Justice Croom-Johnson wasn’t known in particular for sympathy toward squatters but, perhaps wary of the great local and national press interest, determined to follow the letter of the law to a T. And what the law said was clear: Obtaining a possession order had nothing to do with whether the owner had an alternative use for the property, or with whether the evicted tenants would become homeless. What it depended on was three very technical matters: (1) serving the summons correctly, (2) showing that the occupiers were there without a license or consent, and (3) convincing the judge that “reasonable steps” had been taken to find out the names of the occupiers.

The vast majority of squatting cases are never contested; squatters don’t bother going to court, and judges affirm possession orders almost automatically. But this was going to be different. On the morning of the court case the people of Tolmers, young and old, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, gathered in the square with banners and posters. With arms linked, singing songs, they marched in procession the twenty-minute walk to the High Court in the Strand.

Stock Conversion had hired the services of a renowned firm of solicitors, led by a hotshot property barrister who would normally have had nothing to do with such trifling affairs. The team included two barristers, four solicitors, two private investigators, and four representatives of the company. On the other side a young trainee solicitor who was squatting in Drummond Street managed to persuade his little firm to represent the squatters in defense. And although a lawyer experienced in squatting cases agreed to act as barrister for the defense, the matchup resembled that of David and Goliath. Nor did the proceedings start off well for the defense: Their motion to hear all the cases together was rejected; instead the judge decided that he would hear them case-by-case, household-by-household. All other parties were ordered out of the courtroom.
¹⁰

The first case hinged on a doorbell. Had the squatters heard the ring of the private investigator hired by Stock Conversion to take “reasonable steps” in ascertaining their names? The investigator’s report stated that he had “knocked loudly,” but the squatters claimed that he should have rung the independent doorbell, for a knock would not be heard in the flat. After an hour the judge adjourned, pending precise information about the location of the bell and clarification from the private eye—who was absent—about the details of his knocking movements. The TVA knew that there was no chance of winning the battle in court against the speculators. But with the right tactics they might stall long enough to give the political opposition enough time to build up greater strength, or even for the development situation to change so that Stock Conversion would no longer have a reason for the evictions. The adjournment was therefore greeted with glee. But when the private investigator finally took his seat in the witness box the following week, he turned out to be a clean looking, decent ex-policeman, and his testimony that by “knocking” he had meant “knocking and ringing” was accepted by the judge, and the possession order was duly granted to the claimants.

One after the other the cases came before Justice Croom-Johnson, and in each case he found for the speculators. The Tolmers group waiting outside the courtroom was beginning to lose heart; no biblical miracle was going to fell this Goliath. But then came the case of the squat on 217 North Gower Street. The occupants—two medical students, a flute student at the Royal Academy, three local-authority social workers, and a housing surveyor—each swore on oath that they had been at the squat at the time the private investigator claimed he had come knocking at their door, and that they would have opened the door if they had heard a knock. They all seemed honest, and their conviction was strong. Croom-Johnson adjourned for ten minutes. Everyone in and around the courtroom held their breath. Finally, in a twenty-five-minute summation in which he spoke of both the private investigator and the squatters as reliable and trustworthy, Croom-Johnson announced that he had no option but to throw the case out and to award costs against Stock Conversion.

A roar of joyful laughter and clapping was heard outside the courtroom from the squatters in the hall. Immediately, a gofer was sent to give word to the press, and drinks were poured for all in celebration. The next day the Camden Council announced that it was going to buy all Stock Conversion land in the Tolmers area. It was “the victory of the year,” the barrister for the defense was quoted, and the
Hampstead and Highgate Express
pronounced “A Square Deal for the People.” The triumph, at least for now, was complete.
¹¹

It had been a true battle between collective and individual; the cooperative community of Tolmers against the selfish speculator Mr. Joe Levy. The selection and expectation terms of the equation had been applied to the individual and the group respectively, and the group-selection term had clearly made the difference. The anonymous man who had written the math explaining the structure of change better than anyone before him already lay deep beneath the ground at Saint Pancras Cemetery, but his brainchild had borne out its prediction.

The sweeping tale of attempts at an “altruism code” invites to the stage spitting tadpoles and “free-riding” cuckoos; sacrificing slime molds, naked blind mole rats, horn-locked oryxes, dung flies, rabbit viruses, and the overabused stepchildren of man. It spans the globe from the far reaches of the Siberian Afar to the South American tropics, from the prairies of Indiana to the African plains. It traverses from Aristotle and Jesus and Aquinas through Hume and Adam Smith and Malthus; from John D. Rockefeller to John von Neumann, from World War I to Vietnam. It takes in the Manhattan Project, the invention of the transistor and computer, Bell Labs and IBM; and it embraces the burlesque theaters of Great Depression New York as well as the subversive cinemas of squat-infested seventies London. From Darwin to Kropotkin and Huxley, from Warder Clyde Allee to Vero Cope Wynne-Edwards; from J. B. S. Haldane, the “last man to know all there is to know,” to R. A. Fisher the Anglican apostle; from John Maynard Smith to Bill Hamilton to Bob Trivers; from Isak Preis to George Price; from nineteenth-century czars to mid-twentieth-century telepathists to biological mathematicians and brain imagers today.