The Price of Altruism (35 page)

Then Hamilton turned to the secret biblical cipher. If this really was some kind of “altruism code,” the biblical analogue to George’s covariance equation, Bill wasn’t particularly interested in being convinced. Aesthetics were behind his avoidance of George’s “homework” assignment, he explained; there was a “sense of beauty” he had grown up with, a kind of “sense of human freedom” in this case, that was whispering to him that the enterprise was wrong:

If Hamilton’s aesthetic sense had served him well, “like the far-reaching antennae of a cockroach,” then it was telling him now that the extreme detail of George’s unraveling of prophecy was unsatisfactory in some way. But his covariance equation, of course, was something entirely different. Hamilton had just read an article by the American mathematical population geneticist Richard Levins who had protested (like George) against the idea that group selection is an unproved and perhaps unworkable concept. And yet Levins, Hamilton thought, had ended up showing that the conditions that allow it to work are rather more stringent than he had anticipated. Hamilton had high hopes that applying George’s formula to nature would allow scientists to do better. Really, he was much more excited about following George’s lead in this direction than he was his scriptural exegesis. Meanwhile, he signed off kindly, “I had better get back to the ants, bees and wasps.”
⁶¹

George replied that reading Hamilton’s letter was like torture. What was at stake was truth, not beauty:

That he should have accused his friend Bill Hamilton of ceasing to be scientific was amusing for the very same accusation was now being launched against George. In a fateful twist of irony, the man making the charge was none other than Joseph Rhine, the professor of parapsychology from Duke whom George had accused of fraud in 1955.

Shortly after his conversion, George had written to Rhine to apologize. He had assumed Rhine had cheated in his ESP experiments in order to promote Christian beliefs, and, being an anti-Christian in those days, had therefore sought to expose him to stem any possible tide. Now that he was a Christian himself he felt terrible about the matter, and had even sent a letter of apology to
Science
. In fact, if anyone had been a cheat, it was George himself. Back in Poughkeepsie in 1961 he’d performed a card experiment with a few IBM friends in which the odds against chance were beaten 300 to 1. “The odds then were such as to force a test upon me: not so low that I could shrug them off, not so high that I was forced to believe. I am afraid that I failed that test very badly.” In fact, this had been George’s first “burning bush” his second, he reported thankfully, he finally “turned aside to see.”
⁶³

Rhine was baffled, amused, mostly intrigued. He thanked George for his kind words. In his youth he himself had sought out an experience of conversion, but found the evidential basis inadequate to his questioning mind. Instead he had turned to science, where he came to question the dogmatic materialism he found, which in turn led to his curiosity about parapsychology. Far from being an evangelical Christian, he wasn’t in the slightest religious. In truth, his interest had been purely scientific: Could laws of nature exist that had not been captured by conventional physics? George’s apology was really unnecessary. Whatever merit the field had to offer had to rest on its own evidence, and couldn’t claim any support from authority of any kind. In fact, he was glad to report, most scientists had come to feel the same way: The Parapsychological Association had recently become an official affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
⁶⁴

Jokingly he recalled a story he had heard. Some years back a New York reporter had printed a request to his readers for descriptions of their experiences of a psychic nature. One reply came from a woman who, after describing her vivid conversations with the dead, wrote that her son had written a scathing review of the matter in
Science
back in ’55, but that she knew more about this kind of stuff than he did. George thanked Rhine kindly, said it sounded like his mother, and told him that Alice had died two years earlier.
⁶⁵

But soon after “Apology to Rhine and Soal” appeared in
Science
at the beginning of 1972, what started as a friendly correspondence began to change in tone. While George was curious about why Rhine hadn’t turned to religion, having found that his ESP results were incompatible with science, Rhine wondered how George planned to reconcile his newfound faith with science. He had never thought of ESP as incompatible with science; his only problem had been with the dogmatic assumption that known physics explains everything and that anything unexplained by it must therefore be unscientific. The more they wrote to each other, the more the differences between them became apparent. Rhine thought scientists sometimes make mistakes from being too dogmatic; George thought it was because the Lord “makes foolish the wisdom of the wise” in a world he constructed as a test for man. Rhine thought man was something more than matter, but that this didn’t necessarily imply a godly spirit, as George believed, only scientific laws yet to be discovered.

Just as with Henry Noel, Henry Morris, and the Reverend John Stott before him, an amicable approach had turned nasty. Rhine was backing out of an offer that George write an article on the history of the 1955 paper for the
Journal of Parapsychology
; he wasn’t about to have his name affiliated with him anymore. Scores of angry letters crossed the Atlantic. Alice was right, Rhine finally wrote, George really didn’t know what he was talking about. “Why do you not just let parapsychology alone for now,” he broke off, weary of the insults, “if only for your own peace of mind? I lectured at the University of Minnesota day before yesterday and nobody mentioned your name.”
⁶⁶

It was less than kind, but it hurt because it was true. George had seen things that no scientist had seen before him. At the same time, retreating into a strange world of his own, he was ranting against family, antagonizing friends, pushing away acquaintances. Increasingly alone, he seemed almost willfully blind to the feelings of those around him. His equation would help solve the mystery of altruism, but his marriage to the Lord’s commands had led to the darkest caverns of human selfishness.

Soon, however, all that would change dramatically.

Letter to daughter Kathleen, March 24, 1973

B
y the time he wrote to the Reverend Billy Graham, a large portion of the 58,148 American soldiers, 223,748 South Vietnamese soldiers, 1,100,000 North Vietnamese soldiers, and approximately 4,000,000 civilians on both sides of the divide had died in Vietnam. Richard Nixon had just recently appeared at one of Graham’s revivals in east Tennessee, becoming the first president to give a speech from an evangelist’s platform. George’s was a heartfelt plea: The war had to be stopped. Could the reverend exercise his influence over the president to bring about the end of bloodshed?
¹

War was on his mind. He’d begun working again on the antlers paper
Nature
asked him to shorten back in 1969, plugging at the IBM 360/65 computers at UCL to come up with an unbeatable strategy for combat. He’d even gone up to the annual Animal Behavior Association conference in Birmingham in July 1970, returning to London encouraged by positive feedback.
²

“Computer simulation of two animal conflict sounds dismally similar to the work in conflict theory which has been done by our students of international relations these past fifteen years,” Al wrote to him that December, unconvinced that his friend’s efforts were worth anything at all. But George plugged away all the same. “I don’t know if my program will seem ‘dismally similar’ when you know more about it,” he answered. “Aren’t the conflict theory studies related to strategic advantages rather than psychological mechanisms? And if the latter, then it is interesting if animals and men go through similar reasoning in their conflicts (two main concepts in my treatment are ‘who started it?’ and ‘get even’).”
³

Al didn’t give up. “Pardon my skepticism about combat simulation programs. The difficulty at the most obvious level is that we have no clear evidence as to how people actually behave in real life combat situations. We can speculate all we want about this, but we can’t get inside the participants’ heads. Arguments by analogy, whether from animal behavior or from a computer simulation, seem to me to lack credibility.”
⁴

As usual George fought back with his quirky sense of humor. He’d just recently given his first sermon in church, and had begun sending a steady barrage of C. S. Lewis books to friends and family abroad. He was feeling good about himself. “In regard to your paragraph beginning, ‘Pardon my skepticism about combat simulation programs,’” he replied, “it would have been more judicial for you to have written something along these lines:

In truth, George was stuck with the computer simulations on animal conflict; by now he had practically abandoned them. His real intention in writing to Al had been to get him sufficiently riled up over the Passion schedule—part bemused, part challenged—that he’d send it to some of the biblical scholars at his university, if only to save face. But Al wasn’t interested in what he took as his friend’s new mumbo jumbo. He stuck to the science, where he remained unimpressed: “You apparently overlook one fact: no one has yet found a way to simulate a ‘real life political situation’ and I doubt that even a person of your own admitted talents can accomplish it.” Then he added, “notwithstanding one John Maynard Smith.”
⁶

How had J. B. S. Haldane’s beloved student John Maynard Smith become involved with George? It had all begun at UCL in the late 1940s, when he and his fellow students caught wind of Konrad Lorenz’s recent discoveries in animal behavior. Lorenz was a bumptious, domineering, goateed Austrian, controversial for having been a member of the Nazi Party and yet recognized as the father of modern ethology and on his way to a Nobel Prize.
⁷
Ritualized fighting, Lorenz claimed, was the norm in nature, not the exception: When animals compete for territory or mates, they seldom use all the weapons at their disposal but rather settle for aggressive displays.
⁸
In line with the times, Lorenz thought that this was good for the species: If escalated fights were common, the abundance of injury might militate against the survival of the species. “Pangloss’ Theorem,” JBS furiously scribbled in the margins of a paper in which his student Maynard Smith adopted Lorenz’s assumption; this was “group selection” nonsense and had no place in biology.
⁹

A decade later, over in America, Richard Lewontin finished reading the current popular textbook on game theory,
Games and Decisions
, by Luce and Raiffa, two former members of the RAND Corporation. Lewontin was a quick-witted, politically engaged Harvard population geneticist, considered by many the most brilliant theoretician of his generation, and by others a dangerous, radical Marxist. Unable to cope with the idea of fitness being so dependent on context, he turned to game theory for answers. Maybe fitness could somehow be measured as a consequence of interactions; using von Neumann’s approach, he set out to model a game between animals and nature.
¹⁰

But the game Lewontin constructed could only measure the fitness of a species against a changing environment; constructing a game between the genes of animals interacting among themselves
and
the environment proved too complicated a task. Since modeling such interactions would entail making simplifications that to Lewontin seemed far removed from nature, he abandoned game theory as a tool useful to the biologist. Game theory might tell a coherent story, he thought, but that didn’t mean that it was loyal to reality. And Lewontin wasn’t interested in “interesting but not true.”
¹¹

Meanwhile, in England, John Maynard Smith had spent the better part of the sixties working on the physiology of aging, the genetics of patterns, and, toward the end of the decade, on theoretical issues related to the evolution of sex. The question was: Why was there sex in the first place? If people were going to argue against Wynne-Edwards’s group-selection explanations for his birds, he thought, it wouldn’t do to put the evolution of sex down to the good of the species. And yet this was still the prevalent explanation: Sex had come about in nature because it was a wonderful way to create variation. And since more variation meant more gumption for a population facing a changing environment, even though individuals engaging in it would have to give up passing down 50 percent of their genes to the next generation, not to mention expending all that energy in finding and bedding a mate, groups with sex would outcompete groups that reproduced asexually. By “inventing” sex, in its wisdom, natural selection had overridden personal interest in favor of the common good, filling the world with infinite variety. But this couldn’t be right, Maynard Smith thought, remembering Haldane’s furious Panglossian scribbles. And so, spurred to action, looking for an individual rather than group-selection slant, he was working on cracking the mystery of sexuality.
¹²

It was around that time that John Maddox,
Nature
’s editor, sent him a paper titled “Antlers, Intraspecific Combat, and Altruism,” by George R. Price. John hadn’t heard of the guy, but boy, was this interesting! First of all, here was a solid attack on the assumption of group selection: When all was said and done, it seemed to say, individual selection was just as fine an explanation. But there was more to the paper than an appeal to parsimony: Just as with two poker players staring each other down, Price had considered combat to be a game in which each animal’s strategy is dependent on the other. This had led him to see that if animals adopted a strategy of “retaliation” whereby they normally fight conventionally but respond to escalated attacks by escalating in turn, this would be favored by selection at the individual level. It was a strikingly original insight. Of course all of von Neumann’s games assumed rationality on the part of the players, and doing the same for animals was clearly not in the cards. Still, if one constructed a kind of payoff matrix in units of fitness, natural selection could replace rational thought. Lo and behold, short of drawing out an actual matrix, that was precisely what George Price had done!
¹³

Excited about the paper, John recommended acceptance provided it was shortened;
Nature
wasn’t the place to publish articles fifty pages long. About a year later he arranged to spend three months working with the University of Chicago working with the Committee on Mathematical Biology. It wasn’t a bad place to choose if you were interested in game theory, which, spurred by George’s paper, John Maynard Smith now certainly was. Although aware both of Fisher’s sex-ratio argument and Lewontin’s game between species and nature, John judged the field to be a blank slate as virginal as it was promising. After all, Fisher hadn’t formalized his idea, nor had Lewontin applied it to the interactions between animals. Familiar with Hamilton’s 1967 extraordinary sex-ratio paper, he initially hadn’t seen its relevance to the combat of animals. The only existing bridge, therefore, was the paper on antlers. Working with what George had termed the deer’s “genetic strategy…stable against evolutionary perturbation,” he applied his mathematical skill in service of marrying game theory to evolutionary biology. The formal concept he came up with, closely based on George’s, he called an evolutionary stable strategy, or ESS for short.
¹⁴

John left Chicago toward the end of 1970, and back again in England was now writing a paper. An ESS was formally equivalent to a Nash equilibrium: It was a behavioral strategy such that, if a majority of the population adopts it, there is no “mutant” that would give higher reproductive fitness. It was a wonderfully enlightening concept: If one could find an ESS for combat behavior, for example, it would serve as a good argument that such behavior had actually evolved. Clearly he would have to reference George’s paper as the major source behind the insight. Scouring through the literature he found no sign of it, though, not in
Nature
or anywhere else. “Antlers” had disappeared, as suddenly and fantastically as it had made its entrance. Having come across him briefly at a visit to the Galton in September, and wary of not giving credit where credit was due, Maynard Smith now sat down to pen a letter to George.
¹⁵

Of course! He’d be glad to be thanked in reference to the antlers paper, George replied to John’s kind request for the specifics of citation. Somewhat cryptically, though, he suggested a better way to express acknowledgment: “If one mentions an ‘unpublished manuscript,’” he explained, “then someone may wonder about whether it was used with permission, but if you speak of ‘discussion,’ then no such suspicion arises.” Maynard Smith didn’t quite understand George’s meaning and didn’t press the point. He was glad simply to have found him, and besides, as the dean of Biological Sciences at Sussex University for close to a decade, he had plenty on his plate.
¹⁶

Back in Little Titchfield Street, and once again provided a stage by CABS at the
Annals of Human Genetics
, George had just submitted another paper. In “Extension of Covariance Selection Mathematics” he showed more explicitly than in the short 1970
Nature
paper how covariance could be extended to multiple levels of selection. This, after all, had been the true beauty of his equation, the special extra piece of the puzzle that showed that when selection worked at a higher level, genuine goodness between individuals could evolve.
¹⁷
Still, it was more of an outline of the approach than a direct application to any problem; having had the original flash of insight, it almost seemed, George had lost interest in fleshing out the rest. The winter of 1972 was nearing its end, and by now he had two utterly different distractions on his mind: Jesus and sex, in that order.

The first of these, he wrote to a friend, consisted in hearing God’s commandments clearly and uncovering the Devil’s designs.
¹⁸
The second had to do with the question of the rate of evolution, for sex could speed up evolution by providing more variation for natural selection to work with. He’d been following John Maynard Smith’s papers on the matter, and was trying to work things out for himself.