The Price of Altruism (18 page)

Back in the Zoology Department, Allee was breathing in the winds of change. He had always argued that cooperation was all about the individual: the individual adjusting to its environment, the individual adjusting to other organisms, the individual becoming a part of the group. It was physiology that drove things, the challenge of reacting to the environment. Huxley had taken the Darwinian struggle for existence to be nothing but a bloody war. But Darwin was softer: “A plant on the edge of a desert,” he had written, “is said to struggle for life against the drought.” Like Kropotkin, Allee trained his gaze there: to where the chronicle of nature bespoke organisms coming together to fight the elements to survive, not of a ruthless
bellum omnium contra omnes
. Cooperation was the happy result of organisms reacting to things like the chemistry of gases and the physics of camouflage.

Down the hall, though, Emerson had gotten to him. Far from simply being about individual physiology, aggregation was a problem in population biology. Perhaps it was the group, after all, which counted more than the individual. Perhaps a starfish aggregated not simply to adjust to a lack of cover but because natural selection favored groups that clumped together over those that didn’t. Signs of paralysis had appeared in Allee’s legs back in 1930, and operations were performed to remove the growth. In 1938 a third operation had left his legs paralyzed. Now in a wheelchair and more dependent than ever, he wondered about the “superorganism” and the meaning of integration of the individual with the whole.
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Emerson had argued that the individual was to the population as the cell was to the body. But if integration was to be studied properly, Allee thought, analogies would not suffice. If populations had their own unique traits, if the “superorganism” really was alive, he wanted to know how it worked. Chickens would provide him with answers.

As with many social animals, chicken life revolved around a hierarchy: Low-ranking hens lost a great proportion of their fights to higher-ranking ones, all the way up to the dominant hen at the very top.
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Allee knew that dominant hens laid more eggs than subordinates. This made it look as if selection were simply working on individuals: the stronger and more aggressive gaining a larger representation in future generations. If that were true, integration would be meaningless. Just as Simpson had argued, groups would be collections of individuals and nothing more.

Impressed by Wright’s group-selection equations, he searched for a different explanation and together with a student soon made an encouraging discovery: Socially unstable flocks ate less, were scrawnier, laid fewer eggs, and had smaller combs than flocks where hierarchy was well established. Not only that: Once dominance-subordination relationships were stable, overall aggression dropped dramatically. Hierarchy was a group property, after all, a wise and benevolent integrating mechanism. The road to Mount Harmony traveled through the Lowlands of Competition.
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It was a satisfying solution but it left Allee cold. Competition, after all, wasn’t supposed to be part of the natural equation. And yet here, and in the “higher” vertebrates of all creatures, it seemed a cardinal ingredient for survival. What would the Friends think of that?

Just two months before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in June 1945, Allee had made the problem clear in an article in the
New Republic
. Not only was competition a part of the game, it necessarily would lead to instability and bloodshed. “Sooner or later,” he wrote,

If Nature was mankind’s moral compass, what was to be done? Was civilization condemned to eternal cycles of bloodshed?

He cringed at the thought. To be sure, sea urchins and chickens had taught him that there were two forces acting in nature: “the self-centered egoistic drives which lead to personal advancement and self-preservation, and the group-centered, more-or-less altruistic drives that lead to the preservation of the group.” But how, ultimately, was the circle to be squared? Weighing the alternatives, he finally came down on the side of goodness. “After much consideration, it is my mature conclusion…that the cooperative forces are biologically the more important and vital.” Hierarchy and dominance, after all, were a mark of the social vertebrates alone; if one considered the bigger picture, they were just one tiny branch on the great tree of cooperative life. Competition had arrived late in the evolutionary game. Man was a vertebrate, all right, but he needed to learn from the isopods.
⁵²

To rise to the challenge he would have to break down barriers, not erect them. Gender, family, races, nations: all only ever led to division. Like isopods, independent humans didn’t have to be related to come to one another’s aid. They needn’t be of the same race or nationality. All they needed to do was to act toward one another
as if
they were closest of kin. It was the cooperative instinct of the individual, not the exclusive politics of the family, where goodness and altruism had come from. But now it was time to graduate to the next level. Once individuals came together, the “superorganism” could be born, gaining a life of its own. Then, like all good things, it would be selected by evolution.
⁵³

Sitting slouched in his wheelchair, the “Hustlin’ Quaker” took a moment to reflect. It had been a long journey: from Indiana to Chicago, from believer to scientific pacifist, from ecologist of the individual to evolutionist of the group. His friend Emerson saw cooperation as a mechanism of homeostasis, a means to accomplish an end. But by now Allee had learned that life was much less utilitarian. Far from a means to an end, peaceful cooperation had been Nature’s initial design, her honeyed Garden of Eden. With such thoughts in his heart, he wheeled his chair down to the South End of Chicago, where he’d be helping to build interracial summer camps for black and white children. At long last he knew what he believed in: education as deliverance, biology as morality, the peaceful group, mercifully, both the end and cherished goal. Man had come a long way but mustn’t abandon the wisdom of his evolutionary past. It was time to return to the ways of the starfish.

Behind guarded gates in terra cotta and putty white midrises just a block from the Santa Monica beach, they sat in swivel chairs in cubbies twiddling pencils and making jokes.

There were no rules: Surfing, semantics, outer space, Finnish phonology, neurosis, the Arab class system, a hermeneutic study of the writings of Lenin, an analysis of the popular toy-store puzzle “Instant Insanity”…they could study whatever tickled their fancy. The official air force contract called it “research on intercontinental warfare,” but mainly they were being paid to “think the unthinkable”: How many casualties would there be if a nuclear bomb were dropped on Cleveland? How would Washington know? How should intercontinental ballistic missiles be developed? What were the odds of a Soviet attack, the pros and cons of an American one?
⁵⁴

The RAND Corporation was a civilian nonprofit think tank chartered in March 1948. For an elite cadre of physicists, mathematicians, economists, and political scientists, it was the Cold War equivalent of Los Alamos.
Pravda
called it the “American academy of death and destruction,” and there were some wary Americans who concurred. Amid crew cuts, pipes, and practical jokes, a strange zeitgeist pervaded: the worship of the rational and the quantified, a geopolitical obsession, and a “weirdly compelling mix of Olympian detachment, paranoia, and megalomania.” Game theory was central. The head of the mathematics division, John Williams, wanted the very best men at his disposal. John von Neumann was at the top of his list.
⁵⁵

His services had already been called for in battle. In World War II his students had devised bombing strategies for the air force designed to minimize the chance of pilots being shot down over enemy territory.
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Von Neumann himself advised Gen. Leslie Groves, military chief of the Manhattan Project, on where best to drop the atom bombs in Japan. (A note in his handwriting dated May 10, 1945, reads: “Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, Kokura.”) Whether it was a poker player staring down an opponent, a couple arguing over going to a film or the opera, firms bidding at auctions, or two nations building stockpiles of atomic bombs, von Neumann provided solutions. The bounce of the dice, the flip of the card, the raised eyebrow of a totalitarian ruler—all divulged an elemental truth: Human beings are self-seeking, rational agents out to maximize their gains in a fierce, competitive world. Game theory would teach them how best to wage their wars.
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And so now, between “high-proof, high I.Q.” parties at Williams’s home in Pacific Palisades, the brilliants of the division went to work. John Nash, Paul Samuelson, John Milnor, Lloyd Shapley—all were there beside von Neumann. In September 1948 the young Kenneth Arrow was given the task of demonstrating that it was okay to apply game theory to nations even though it was formulated in terms of individuals. What his “Impossibility Theorem” showed was not encouraging for integration: It is logically impossible to add up the choices of individuals into an unambiguous social choice under any conceivable constitution. Except, that is, dictatorship. Just as people were beginning to swallow Arrow’s frog, Melvin Dresher and Merrill Flood devised a game that did not bode well either. The Princeton mathematician Albert Tucker, also at RAND, named it the “prisoner’s dilemma.” A version of it goes like this:

The problem was that if both prisoners were rational and self-seeking, both would reason exactly in the same way. What that meant was that they would both “defect” and get two years in jail, whereas had they “cooperated” and kept their mouths shut, they’d only have to serve one year—a better solution for everybody. It was a maddening contradiction of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand: The pursuit of self-interest does not necessarily promote the collective good. Nash, a handsome but strange genius who would soon fall into schizophrenia, had just proved that there was an optimal solution to games played by many people in which interests were overlapping, not just diametrically opposed. It was an important extension of the “minimax theorem,” but was contradicted by the prisoner’s dilemma. Dresher and Flood figured that either Nash or von Neumann would solve the paradox. Neither ever did. The conflict between individual and collective rationality was real.
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War or Peace, the Individual or the Collective: Where had and would true “goodness” come from? As always, man and animal, civilization and the wild, were helplessly entangled. New vocabularies had been developed by game theorists, economists, and ecologists: “integration,” “regulation,” “optimization,” “homeostasis,” “group selection,” “efficiency.” Each offered confident prescriptions. And yet the hard questions still remained: What was the natural state? Was it noble? Should it be followed? How and, ultimately, why? The battle of the nineteenth-century gladiators had not yet been decided. Huxley and Kropotkin’s legacy was alive.