The Price of Altruism (45 page)

This kind of data is exciting to some, but leaves others scratching their heads. What do students divvying up fifty shekels in a controlled experiment on a college campus have to do with real-life altruism? If variation in the receptor gene also affects marital status, the chances for divorce, and autism, how specific is it really? Autistic people may find it difficult to marry, but aren’t egoism and selflessness in a relationship relative and fluctuating? Finally, and perhaps most important, if the different DNA profiles account for just a few percentage points of the variation in altruistic behavior at best, in what sense do they account for the behavior at all? Causality is a tricky beast, especially when it comes to humans. Even the most sterling cancer research studies claim barely a 4 percent stake for their pet agents with regard to the occurrence of disease. And figuring out the relationship between altruism and genetics is infinitely more complex than figuring out the connection between lung cancer and tobacco.

What does all this mean?

Like many of us, Sally Adams of Hampstead, London, isn’t sure what it all means, but she knows that she wants a baby. Having spent more than £15,000 on fertility treatments, and even traveled to Crete for her cause, Sally has not given up. Over fifty years old, a cat lover, and single, she has the requisite sperm in hand; only a tiny egg remains missing. Recently Sally advertised the fact that she is looking for an egg donor from among Oxford and Cambridge graduates. Her reason: Oxbridge graduates are not only intelligent but often also “very altruistic.”
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Whether through brain imaging, animal behavior experiments, dictator games, genetic typing, gene-culture interaction models, or advertising in the
Daily Telegraph
, the timeless search for altruism continues, with “admiration and awe.”

George Price, London, fall of 1974

A
fter World War II the old Victorian church in the middle of Tolmers Square was converted into a cinema. When it was being swept up after a showing, back to front, rats would come out the front door, run around the building, and go in the back door, every night exactly the same. Still the locals loved it. With stall tickets going for fifteen pence and circle ones for twenty-five pence, it was the cheapest theater in London, and queues of two hundred would gather for the Sunday-afternoon performance. When Joe Levy and Stock Conversion bought it out in 1972, a veil of sadness descended over the neighborhood. Appropriately
The Looters
and
Die Slowly, You’ll Enjoy It More
were the last films ever screened. One pensioner wrote in rage to the local paper:

George moved into a squat in the square on July 15, 1974; the cinema had long been demolished, and a barbed-wire fence erected around the site had given it the look of a concentration camp. The entrance to the squat was through Tolmers number 19, but the walls between apartments 19–25 had been destroyed to make room for a large silk-screen-printing studio on the first floor. Together with two other squatters, Vince and Dave, George could share the entire second floor. Everything was extremely primitive: the toilet, the shower, the kitchen. But after what he’d been through, George thought it grand. The barbed-wire-surrounded outdoor courtyard notwithstanding, it was the nicest home he had lived in, he thought, since his babyhood home with his mommy and daddy in Scarsdale.
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The next day he sat on a bench to talk to Sylvia, the twenty-five-year-old American printmaking artist who worked together with Petal (a man) on the first floor. Sylvia was the daughter of a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot wing commander and had moved to Europe with an old boyfriend; now, together with a few friends, she had opened a gallery called Artists for Democracy on Whitfield Street. A group of them became the Poster Collective and had set up a squat studio at 19 Tolmers. She was living at number 68 Warren Street, just between Tolmers and the gallery. She had dark hair, a beautiful face and body, and said she came from Colorado.
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Even among the politicos, the artists, the eccentrics and the druggies, George cut an unusual figure. He was scraggly and often unclean. His teeth were rotting, and he suffered from a terrible raspy cough. And yet this stranger, his thin legs crossed, had the most amazing stories! He told her about his work at the Manhattan Project and at IBM, about Skinner, and Shannon, and Senator Humphrey. He spoke about Bell Labs and his Design Machine, about his attack on the Soviets in
Life
magazine. He told of his brother, Edison, back home, who had invented track lighting and worked with great architects like I. M Pei, Louis Kahn, and Buckminster Fuller.
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He told her about his own journeys into genetics and evolution, about animal conflict and the equation that solved the problem of altruism. But mostly he spoke about the people he was trying to help, about their addictions, their sorrows, and hopes. George was a gentleman, she thought, a quiet, thinking man who talked in a high, squeaky voice, almost like a baby. There was something about him, she felt, that “just wanted to ‘be.’”
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At the end of a day’s work at the studio, she’d walk out into the square and set her sights back home. Increasingly, there was George, waiting to walk her across the Euston Road. He was lonely and she liked him; she was glad of his company. On rare occasions he’d come up to the collective kitchen for a cup of tea. But soon Sylvia began to see that for George this was more than just a friendship. Over in France, his old friend Henry Noel reproached him: Of course George might be an exception, but “when an ex-married man, over fifty, falls in love with a girl who could be his daughter, he is not on a Godward path.”
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To Sylvia it was clear that his infatuation had nothing to do with her per se. The real reasons were mysterious, tucked deep inside his imagination. He was obsessive and intense but at the same time somehow not connected to the “real” world. When he asked her to marry him the first time, sitting together on the bench, she declined with a smile. When he asked again, she tried to quiet him with a chuckle. Really, George, she’d say. I like you. But marriage and romance are out of the question.

To Hamilton he divulged the true scope of his transformation: He had just recently left his job as a night office cleaner (“my supervisor was sorry to have me leave”). He was giving up his work on genetic polymorphism (“Harry, for reasons that I am not certain about, is not interested in having me finish”). He was giving up on their project on sexual selection (“I think maybe you’ll be better off without me in your beetle theorizing”). He believed that a new phase had started in his life, “where Jesus wants me to do less about helping others and give more attention to sorting out my own problems,” at least for a certain number of years. He was going to marry “someone named Sylvia (from Colorado),” and move to America to raise a family and maybe do some economics. Sylvia didn’t quite share his feelings yet, he knew, but George was optimistic. “Let’s wait and see what happens,” he wrote, before reminding Bill that he had some books in the squat that he could pick up the next time he was in London.
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The following week George typed up a letter to the CPL Recruitment Division at 14 Old Park Lane. “Your advertisement in
Computer Weekly
for a programmer-analyst with IBM FORTRAN experience to work on ‘a complex financial modeling system’ at City Bank,” he opened, “fits my background and present interests just about exactly.” After describing the optimization work at IBM over which he had corresponded with Paul Samuelson back in the sixties, as well as his genetics work at the Galton, George explained that his current plan was to get in touch again with Samuelson and inquire about a research appointment at MIT. “That finishes describing the relevant parts of my rather odd occupational career,” he wrote, explaining that his plan should not dissuade them from hiring him:

Of course this would prevent him from being put in charge of any long-term project, not to mention a lower salary rung than advertised. But George wouldn’t mind. He was a quick learner, and in view of his past experience, could be expected to start producing useful output during the first week. Then he ended: “I don’t think money’s all that important (tactless thing to say when seeking employment from a bank!), and so I would expect to receive substantially less than the 3375 pounds p.a. I was getting when I left University College, though substantially more than the 4.90 pounds per night I was earning in my last job as an office cleaner.”
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He was feeling good about himself again, and no one could stop him. Recently two foot “fuzz” (policemen) had detained him for questioning on the street. He was “hairy, tired and decrepit” soon two more cops appeared in a car, one of them six foot three or four, cold and tough and of high rank. The frisk job didn’t take long to follow: pockets, shoes, socks, carrier bag—they even read his letters from Smoky in jail. The big cop radioed to the station to see if he had a record or was wanted. But George thought he had gotten the last word, he wrote to Kathleen, as is promised in Luke 21:15: “Because I will give you the ability to speak, along with wisdom, that none of your opponents will be able to resist or refute.” He was following a “total honesty policy” now. What this meant Kathleen, back in Hawaii, wasn’t certain, but George at least seemed to know where he was going. He had shaved his mustache and trimmed his beard. He had his hair in a neat ponytail instead of “floating in the wind.” He had started acquiring more possessions instead of giving them away. “Am now apparently heading back upward,” he promised.
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Finally scientific recognition was coming his way. In 1969 when he had come over to New York to see his mother for the last time, George had briefly met with Richard Lewontin. At the time it seemed to him that Lewontin had little interest in what he was doing. “Why don’t you write your paper on Hamilton and not wait for me,” Lewontin had replied in response to a follow-up letter from George; he hadn’t had time yet to look at his covariance equation.
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But now, five years later, Lewontin’s tone had changed. “I am sorry that I did not get to see you when I was in London,” he wrote in a letter addressed to the Galton.

James Crow, a leading population geneticist and longtime collaborator of the “neutral theory” apostle Motoo Kimura, wrote to CABS in the fall from Japan with similar tidings. “Much to my chagrin,” he admitted, “I have only in the last few days ‘discovered’ the papers by him…. I haven’t completely digested it yet, but want to make it a part of my thinking.” He was especially enamored of the second covariance paper, the one in which George showed how selection could be partitioned at different levels. In fact, he had been thinking exactly along the same lines. As for George’s brilliant explication of Fisher’s fundamental theorem, he was at least in 95 percent agreement. This was a good thing because many of the statements made by Fisher were totally opaque: Probably only Fisher and God could understand them, “and probably God has trouble.”
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CABS replied on November 1:

George’s background was in chemistry and computers, he explained, and so, really he had come out of nowhere. As for cracking Fisher’s meaning, it was CABS’s opinion that George was “very like Fisher,” and so, “on the principle that similar minds think along the same lines,” it might just be the case that George had done it. Then he turned to explain the current situation:

In truth no one at the Galton really knew what was happening with George, nor, they would later say, did they quite appreciate how precarious was his existence. Lewontin’s note had arrived in the spring but only reached him in the summer; it had been that long since he had popped in to check his mailbox. “I don’t quite know what to say in response to your extremely kind remarks about my genetics work,” he replied in a handwritten letter.