The Price of Altruism (48 page)

But what, in the end, can the story of the attempts to crack the mystery of altruism teach us?

To begin with, many of the heroes of our tale had strong ideological commitments. From Kropotkin’s anarchism to Huxley’s statism, Allee’s pacific Quakerism to von Neumann’s obsession with war and deceit, Skinner’s belief in a blank slate to Fisher’s Anglicanism to Haldane’s Marxism to Hamilton’s naturism: Our tale teaches that the people doing science, their backgrounds, historical context, family histories, education, political views, religious affiliations, temperament—all play a role. Sometimes the role is straightforward; more often it is very complex. But whether direct or circuitous, subtle or brutish, to understand the science we should always look at more than
just
the science.

That real people do science is a salutary lesson we often learn from looking closely at the history of science, and, upon reflection, should never surprise us. But our story holds a deeper moral that may not be so easy to fathom: One of the pressing challenges of our times is defining the boundary between questions that can be addressed meaningfully by science and those that are outside its purview. Much of the acrimony between people who believe that science has all the answers and those who see science as a threat stems from a failure to rise to this challenge. At the poles of this debate, such as in the one between materialists who mock religion and creationists who lambast evolution, it often seems as though there is an almost constitutional inability to demarcate the lines—a deep confusion as to the territory of spiritual versus scientific pursuits. Ludwig Wittgenstein understood this problem well, which is why he wrote: “Even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.” He ended his famous
Tractatus
with the words: “What we can’t speak about we must pass over in silence.”
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In this context the riveting story of science’s attempts to crack the mystery of altruism assumes a special role. For the search for a biological “altruism code” pits not only the individual against the group and the gene against the individual but also true goodness against masquerading self-interest, and heartless biological necessity against the transcendence of the soul. It is a story of chaos versus order, culture versus instinct, man versus animal. It is therefore a place where scientific fact and moral reasoning meet each other; where, face-to-face, nature and the species struggling to make sense of nature peer directly into each other’s eyes. And so it is a place where the challenge is at its greatest.

At the outset our two nineteenth-century gladiators posed the question: How strong a grip should the biological approach to morality have on our imaginations? Kropotkin thought the answer was a lot, while Huxley rejected any kind of dependence on nature for moral instruction or solace. A century later we can see things more clearly: The Russian anarchist prince was too facile in attributing all our goodness to a “natural state,” while the English bulldog was too strict in cordoning off humanity from its animal origins. Searching for reciprocity in Nature in order to urge it upon civilization is to get things backward: Reciprocal relations define the human condition, and real charity may in fact be a uniquely human invention. While Hobbes may have been right that we are out for ourselves, Rousseau was also right in believing that harmony and progress are possible without government. Self-seeking
can
produce genuine and true benevolence, and, it would seem, there are compelling reasons from evolution to believe that this all began in Nature. So Kropotkin and Huxley both held a piece of the truth.

But if the logic of selection in the prehuman world could have produced the seeds that were developed by civilization into what we call “morality,” what does that say about this very dear invention? What kind of shadow, in other words, does an origin cast, even after its creation has spun far away and developed into something entirely different?

This is a sensitive question. The primatologist Frans de Waal, for instance, argues that “a viable moral system rarely lets its rules get out of touch with the biological imperatives of survival and reproduction,” imperatives based on kin selection and reciprocation that first evolved in mammals.
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This may or may not be true. But it also makes it not all that surprising that Hamiltonian and Trivers-like logic are sometimes attacked for implying genetic determinism. The thought that what is good in us, as well as what is bad, is somehow etched into us, and therefore fundamentally not of our making and outside our control, is abhorrent to most people. Such a reality could well strip life of much of its meaning.

Cynical biological determinists argue that this sentiment is just our self-importance talking; that to admit that we have binding constitutions is too difficult a psychological leap for a self-deluding, proud humanity. This may be true, but it is only half of the story. After all, the feeling that genes do not simply “run the show” com-ports not only with our vanity but also with our exceedingly healthy intuition about reality, as well as with what science is teaching us. Of course Haldane, Maynard Smith, Hamilton, and Price knew this, too. For when they spoke of genes for altruism, they were really only using a shorthand for genes that increase the probability that their bearers will behave altruistically. So long as such behaviors have a heritable component, evolutionary reasoning applies. Despite the incautious remarks of scientists and, more often, of science writers, this does not mean that a behavior is determined; culture and education are still acknowledged as playing a central, even exclusive role. There may be no behavior in humans, strictly speaking, that has no genetic component, but that’s a world away from saying that our genes determine who we are and what we choose. As biologists and anthropologists and mathematicians and philosophers who study the subject today have come to see, natural selection based on
cultural
variation has produced behaviors that have nothing to do directly with genes.
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Most important of all, however, is the recognition that most human behaviors clearly have absolutely nothing to do with natural selection in the narrow, biological sense. For the biologist, the
consequences
of an action for reproductive fitness are what determine whether the action counts as altruistic, not the
intentions
with which the action is performed. Selfishness and altruism in human affairs have nothing to do with tadpoles spitting, mole rats digging, and cuckoos sneaking eggs into strangers’ nests. Kindness is kindness only if it is meant to be so. Of course the brain is an evolved organ. But psychological altruism, the kind we talk about when we are thinking of human affairs, is entirely independent from biological altruism, or the kind that confers fitness on its bearer. Here is a quick illustration: Helping an elderly lady across the street can hardly affect her fitness, since at her age she will not be having any more children. On the other hand, selfishly snubbing a young girl waiting in line to buy an ice cream might lead—who knows?—to her decision to have children who will exact revenge on you someday.

In
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
, Adam Smith softened up a little. “Man possesses the capacities,” he wrote, “which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.”
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Both biological determinists and those who think our evolved natures have nothing to do with our behavior would do well to pay careful attention to the words of the seventeenth-century Edinburgh economist: We are blessed with many gifts. What we do with them is our challenge, for together with kindness we were also given the capacities for cruelty, malice, nonsensicalness, and even boredom. Clearly, if our genetic endowments provide the foundation for both ethical and unethical action, then our moral lives are up to ourselves.

There can be no doubt that social life in Nature put into place the substrates that would one day allow the birth in humans of something we call our moral sense: the policing against cheaters, the mechanism for conflict resolution, and the capacities for empathy, shame, jealousy, sympathy, and rage are all stages on this wondrous evolutionary journey. This same journey also saw the laying down of the basic needs and compulsions of our species: the dependence of young on care, the interdependence of being part of a group, striving for status, sexual desire, motherly instinct, and of course the survival instinct itself. These basic compulsions and necessities are not infinitely pliable, nor should our moral sense ignore them. The fact that goodness may have natural origins—“the so-called moral sense is aboriginally derived from the social instincts,” Darwin wrote—can be made to be confusing and coarsening. In the wrong hands it tends to produce a mentality that discounts what is not utilitarian in the biological sense.

But if the dramatic tale of attempts to crack the biological mystery of altruism teaches us anything it is that we need to do our best to resist this kind of scientistic “originalism.” From Kropotkin, who thought men should return to the animal state, to Huxley, who implored that they shouldn’t; from Emerson, to whom human life was akin to a termite mound, to Fisher’s genes doing God’s work on earth; from Wynne-Edwards’s procreation-forsaking birds instructing about traffic jams to Haldane’s genetics bolstering Soviet Marxism—everyone would have been better off for recognizing this.
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Yes, by all means, natural dispositions play a part in our decision-making process. The brain really
is
an evolved organ, and in this sense there is a connection between biological and psychological altruism; both in the end can be studied from the point of evolutionary theory. But the fact that the brain has evolved is hardly its only interesting or distinguishing feature. Whether we want them to or not, the gifts bestowed upon us by evolution can never lead directly to the moral imperatives that help to shape our lives.

But what about George? Beyond settling the meaning of Fisher’s theorem, coming up with an equation that allows a multilevel approach to selection, and introducing game-theoretic logic into evolutionary biology, what further lesson can his unusual life confer? In a way trying to answer that question amounts to trying to understand his suicide. Why, in the end, did George Price kill himself?

The obvious answer is that George was unwell. Whether he was born that way or became that way, from early on he was different from the rest. His interest in numbers, his obsession with odds and ciphers, his awkwardness in social situations, his repeated behavioral patterns, his inability to hold a job or to stay in one place for long, his frequent insensitivity to the feelings of others—all point to the constitution of a highly gifted, highly unusual character. Before the days when Asperger’s syndrome was routinely diagnosed by psychiatrists, George might have stood somewhere on the slippery spectrum between normal and autistic social behavior. And of course the thyroid problems couldn’t have helped. In particular, failure to take thyroxine for the kind of problem George suffered from is known to cause depression. In George’s case it might also have led to delusions. Joan, for one, felt that he kept getting things all wrong: Years after his death she would claim that she never had any intention of marrying him but had just been trying to save him, while he kept jumping to conclusions. While this is debatable—the letters from the period seem to suggest that she was entirely in love with him—increasingly, undoubtedly, he was becoming unhinged from reality. The last letters from him spoke of wanting to make love in threesomes, and of Jesus and Margot (a BBC colleague to whom she had introduced him) saying that it was not yet time for them to be together. But Margot had been dead for months, a victim of cancer; like his mother, George was talking to the dead. The combination of an unstable personality and the depression brought about by no longer taking his medication might well have pushed him over the deep end, and ultimately to suicide. This is what Joan and Hamilton and the people at UCL thought. It is also what the last doctor to see him, Christopher Lucas, seems to have thought, and there might very well be some truth to it.

But attributing George’s suicide strictly to illness somehow doesn’t feel entirely sufficient; there were life circumstances, too, after all. One of these was Sylvia. Unable to win her heart, George had become despondent. Whether he wanted to marry her because he thought Jesus wanted him to or not is, in a sense, beside the point. His heart was broken, and despair had descended. If the note that he left for her is to be taken at face value, George himself seemed to have decided that he would need to leave this world because of unrequited love.

And yet the suicide arrived just as, in his words to his daughter, George was “heading back upward.” After a year and a half of radical, selfless giving to others, he had come to see that it was time to take care of himself once again. He had decided to hold on to more of his possessions, he had stopped working tirelessly for alcoholics in the square and station and courtrooms and squats. He had begun to try to do some economics, and was planning to write to Samuelson at MIT. Clearly conflicted about whether or not to stay in genetics, he nevertheless seemed to have determined that being a full-time selfless angel was going nowhere.

What might have gone through his head when he thought such thoughts? What, in the final analysis, had his giving been all about?

One way to understand George’s unusual and courageous decision to take destitute and dangerously violent alcoholics off the street and bring them into his home is that it was a test. Pure and simple, this was a religious command. And since George himself came to believe that he was being led by Jesus on a path of suffering, he willingly accepted his fate. If giving to the needy meant having to leave his home, if having to leave his home meant living rough, if living rough meant being hungry and cold and losing all status—so be it. This was the Lord’s wish, and George would follow it, period. And if the Lord had determined that it was time for George to look after himself, then he would follow that command as well.
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