Read The Price of Altruism Online
Authors: Oren Harman
45.
George Price letter to Julia Price, March 10, 1973, GPP.
46.
George Price letter to Julia Price, March 24, 1973, GPP.
47.
Jack London,
The People of the Abyss
(London: Macmillan, 1903).
48.
See Exploring 20th Century London—Homelessness, Museum of London, www.20thcenturylondon.org.uk/server.php?show=conInformationRecord.77, for a well-researched, colorful exhibition. For a classic study of homelessness see Christopher Jencks,
The Homeless
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
49.
George Price letter to Jack (surname unknown—a functionary at Saint Mark’s Church), August 18, 1973, GPP.
50.
John Price letter to George Price, April 5, 1973, GPP; Henry Noel letter to George Price, April 7, 1973, GPP; Tatiana letter to George Price, August 17, 1973, GPP; Edison Price letter to George Price, April 16, 1973, GPP.
51.
George Price to Jack, August 18, 1973.
52.
The Reverend R. F. H. Howarth letter to George Price, July 16, 1973, GPP; George Price letter to Henry Noel, July 22, 1973, GPP.
53.
George Price letter to Kathleen Price, March 19, 1973, GPP.
CHAPTER 12: RECKONINGS
1.
UCL letter to George Price (signed by the assistant secretary of personnel), April 26, 1973, GPP; George Price letter to Julia Price, May 6, 1973, GPP.
2.
George Price letter to Mr. Norman Ingram-Smith, May 27, 1973, GPP.
3.
Ibid.
4.
George Price letter to Jack, August 18, 1973.
5.
Communication from Ursula Mittwoch, May 4, 2008; George Price letter to Dr. Gilfillan, July 3, 1973, GPP.
6.
Trevor Russell (Smoky) to George Price, July 3, 1973, GPP.
7.
Trevor Russell letter to George Price, July 9, 1973, GPP.
8.
Muriel Challenger letter to George Price, September 3, 1973, GPP.
9.
Julia Price letter to George Price, July 30, 1973, GPP.
10.
George Price letter to Smoky, September 14, 1973, GPP.
11.
Ibid.
12.
George Price letter to John Maynard Smith, October 19, 1973, BLJMSC, “Conflict Draft” folder.
13.
George Price letter to John Maynard Smith, February 12, 1973, BLJMSC, “Conflict Draft” folder.
14.
John Maynard Smith letter to George Price, October 24, 1972, BLJMSC, “Conflict Draft” folder. In fact Maynard Smith had been more than scrupulous and entirely generous both to have initially contacted George to get his permission to cite his unpublished antlers paper, and then in offering joint authorship. As for the 1964 Hamilton affair, Maynard Smith always had a conscience about it and did his best to set the record straight. He often remarked that he had a knack, blessed or cursed, for getting ideas from papers he reviewed.
15.
J. Maynard Smith and G. R. Price, “The Logic of Animal Conflict,”
Nature
246 (1973), 15–18, quote on p. 15. Half a year later, in “On Fighting Strategies in Animal Combat,”
Nature
250 (1974), 354, Valerius Geist of the University of Calgary accused John and George of not acknowledging his prior explication of the retaliation principle in V. Geist, “On the Evolution of Hornlike Organs,”
Behaviour
27 (1966), 175. It had been an oversight that George and John were sorry about, and George wrote a letter of apology. See George Price letter to V. Geist, March 24, 1974, BLJMSC, “Antlers File.”
16.
Al Somit letter to George Price, September 27, 1973, GPP.
17.
George Price letter to Edison Price, September 26, 1973, GPP.
18.
Cedric Smith note to George Price, November 7, 1973, GPP; Paul Garvey letter to George Price, November 11, 1973, GPP.
19.
George Price letter to Joan Jenkins, November 15, 1973. I thank Jim Schwartz for providing me with copies of the correspondence between Joan and George.
20.
“Monthly Message No. 202,” June 1974, London Healing Mission, GPP.
21.
George Price letter to Kathleen Price, December 6, 1973, GPP.
22.
George Price letter to Morris Goodman, June 7, 1974, GPP; phone interview with Professor Sam Berry, May 5, 2008.
23.
Interviews with Al Somit, December 6, 2007 and April 16, 2008, and communication on May 6, 2009.
24.
Al Somit letter to George Price, November 27, 1973, GPP.
25.
On the speculating bonanzas in London in the sixties see Oliver Marriot,
The Property Boom
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1967); Nick Wates,
The Battle for Tolmers Square
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), 41.
26.
Wates,
The Battle for Tolmers Square
, 23, 24.
27.
Only 4 percent of the properties in the neighborhood were occupied by their owners, whereas 80 percent, three-quarters of which unfurnished, were being rented from a private landlord. Wates; ibid., 8, 9.
28.
Private Eye
, February 9, 1973; Wates,
The Battle for Tolmers Square
, 43–73, quotes on 48, 68, 71, 43.
29.
Communication from Paul Nicholson, February 4, 2008; Wates,
The Battle for Tolmers Square
, 120.
30.
Wates,
The Battle for Tolmers Square
, 129; communication with Paul Nicholson, May 10, 2009.
31.
Communications with Ches Chesney, January 14 and 15, 2008.
32.
Paul Nicholson, “Room At the Top,” unpublished short story.
33.
Wates,
The Battle for Tolmers Square
, 162. Also see Nick Wates and Christian Wolmer, eds.,
Squatting: The Real Story
(London: Bay Leaf Books, 1980).
34.
Communication with Paul Nicholson, February 4, 2008.
35.
Paul Nicholson, “Room At the Top.”
36.
Ibid.
37.
George Price letter to Dr. P. J. D. Heaf, December 16, 1973.
38.
George Price letter to the official solicitor, Royal Courts of Justice, January 30, 1974, GPP.
39.
James Schwartz, “Death of an Altruist,”
Lingua Franca
10, no. 5 (July/August 2000), 51–61, quote on 59,
40.
Beginning in February, George had embarked on a project involving polymorphism analysis of macaque data from Morris Goodman, a professor of anatomy at Wayne State University, via Harris’s collaborator Dr. Nigel Barnicot, an anthropologist at UCL.
41.
Bill Hamilton letter to Dr. Kelly, undated (circa December 10, 1974), BLWHC, Z1X102_1.1.21; Hamilton,
Narrow Roads
, 174.
42.
George Price letter to Bill Hamilton, March 4, 1974, BLGPC, KPX1_2.5; George Price letter to Annamarie Price, April 27, 1974, GPP.
43.
George Price letter to Bill Hamilton, March 4, 1974,
op. cit
.
44.
Bill Hamilton letter to George Price, undated (circa March 6, 1974) BLGPC, BL:KPX1_4.12; Bill Hamilton letter To Whom It May Concern, on Imperial College letterhead, March 14, 1974, BLGPC KPX1_6 arrow KPX1_10.7.2.
45.
George Price letter to Bill Hamilton, May 18, 1974, BLGPC, KPX1_2.5.
46.
I thank Jim Schwartz for kindly sharing with me his notes from his meeting and conversations with Joan Jenkins from 2000. Joan Jenkins died shortly after. For her work on estrogen replacement therapy she was granted an OBE.
47.
George Price letter to Kathleen Price, January 25, 1974, GPP; George Price letter to Joan Jenkins, May 19, 1974; Schwartz notes.
48.
George Price letters to Joan Jenkins, May 20, June 6, June 9, 1974. Often the liaison between the two was Ruth Lang, CABS’s secretary at the Galton.
49.
George Price letter to Kathleen Price, January 25, 1974, GPP; interview with Kathleen Price, April 12, 2008.
50.
George Price letter to Kathleen Price, May 31, 1974, GPP.
51.
Bill Hamilton letter to George Price, June 11, 1974, BLGPC, BL:KPX1_4.6.; George Price letter to Bill Hamilton, August 21, 1974, BLGPC, KPX1_2.5.
CHAPTER 13: ALTRUISM
1.
Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics
, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, 4th rev. ed. (London: Kongmans, Green and Co., 1889), 260.
2.
Williams,
Adaptation and Natural Selection
, 93.
3.
Richard Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 201, 254.
4.
Gene-centrism became wedded to “adaptationism,” and huddled together within a worldview called sociobiology, both were furiously attacked from different quarters. In particular see the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins,
The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976); the philosopher Mary Midgley, “Gene-Juggling,”
Philosophy
54 (1979), 439–58; and the biologists Steven J. Gould and Richard R. Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B
205 (1979), 581–98.
5.
The notion of altruism as a mistake (due to imperfect design) is strengthened by the observation that some species of host birds have developed anticuckoo behavior. See A. Moksnes, E. Roskaft, A. T. Braa, L. Korsnes, H. M. Lampe, and H. C. Pedersen, “Behavioral Responses of Potential Hosts Towards Artificial Cuckoo Eggs and Dummies,”
Behaviour
116 (1990), 64–89.
6.
P. W. Sherman, J. Jarvis, and R. Alexander, eds.,
The Biology of the Naked Mole-Rat
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); D. W. Pfennig, H. K. Reeve, and P. W. Sherman, “Kin Recognition and Cannibalism in Spadefoot Toads,”
Animal Behavior
46 (1993), 87–94; Robert B. Payne, Michael D. Sorenson, and Karen Klitz,
The Cuckoos: Cuculidae
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).