The Price Of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness [Paperback]

Almost completely unknown outside of academia and then perhaps only within evolutionary biology, George Price was a quite simply a genius. This book demonstrates his genius but goes much further and demonstrates his failings as a husband, father and son. Not that Price was necessarily a bad man, just a hugely complicated human being. He possessed a Savant-like ability to research and develop very clear insights. He was also not constrained by feeling of indaquacey in any one discipline. If there was something he didn't know he would (and could) find out what he needed. The problem was that he would invariably lose interest or become sidetracked by something else. So although he trained as a Chemist he was able to invent computer aided design and manufacture and then fail to have the idea patented. He developed a theory for the role of glial cells in human vision while thinking about computer vision, but it stumped the Chief Physiologists of the day because it was too mathematical I suspect (this was before interdisciplinary working was an established practice). After being wounded in a botched operation Price wound up moving to London and making huge contributions to evolutionary biology and game theory, but this time he was recognised by pioneers in the field such as Maynard and it was these guys who supported him and it was University College London (UCL) that gave hime space and reources to continue with his work despite his (by now) wild appearance, sudden funmdamentalist religious conversion and his alcoholic tramp mates. Who would come looking for him in the University with resulting mayhem.

The story doesn't end well and Price was buried in an unmarked grave in London but his contributions are still being used and developed to this day.

That's the story, the book covers all of the above and a hell of a lot of other stuff, taking in Darwin's travels, the Russian Revolution, American Cold War Politics, Post Darwin confusion and above all the search for the evolutionary basis of altruism. It is a complicated and at times, frustrating read. but hang in there and you are ultimately rewarded with a quite literally fantastic tale. It would be hard to make up this kind of stuff and be believed.

This is Price warts and all. He tried to sort it all out and ultimately maybe he tried to take it a step too far and paid the price (hence the cunning title).

Good on you George. RIP.

In The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness, a history of science, particularly the science of evolution, professor and author Oren Harman combines an intellectual history of the search for the origins of altruism with the disturbing story of George Price, the brilliant and eccentric American genius whose insights into the evolution of groups redefined how scientists understand the origins of social behaviors. In common with many of the colorful characters that took a stab at Charles Darwin's great mystery, George Price was an outsider, an unusual and radical character; something about the problem tended to attract minds at the extreme. But if attempts to crack the enigma involve grand histories--Victorian liberalism and Russian anarchism, interwar fascism, Nazi heresies, Vietnam demonstrations, and the dramatic growth of cutting-edge neurogenetics and brain imaging--the story of George Price stands entirely on its own. He was a cross between Forest Gump and the Rain Man, with an uncanny knack of being present while much of the seminal science of the twentieth century was being born. From the Manhattan Project to the telecommunications and computer revolutions at Bell Labs and IBM, he solved problems, then disappeared. And finally, as his family and professional life began to unravel in the late 1960s, he left everything behind and moved to London, Swinging London as it then was, to try his hand at cracking one last great riddle.

Darwin, in his monumentalThe Origin of Species, penned during the Victorian era, had written that natural selection "could never produce in a being anything injurious to itself, for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each." The idea that evolution entails an amoral war of all-against-all runs through the history of evolutionary theory from Herbert Spenser's famous formulation of "survival of the fittest" to Richard Dawkins's more recent "selfish genes." But against this grand vision of "nature red in tooth and claw" stands the indisputable fact of altruism.

Throughout nature, living things pass up advantages and make sacrifices to help fellow members of their species. In ant colonies, drones and queens pass along traits they do not possess to warriors and workers who toil for the greater good of the colony with no hope of passing along their own genes. Sparrows share food with less successful members of their species. Crabs stand guard while other crabs, potential competitors for food and mates, are molting and vulnerable. In a great number of species, mutual aid is the rule rather than the exception. The seemingly impossible act of passing on traits and behaviors that can lead to the rise of selfless behavior was, according to Darwin, "the most serious special difficulty, which my theory has encountered."

Harman, in "The Price," weaves together the centuries-long hunt for an answer to one of evolution's greatest mysteries with the heroism and pathos of a story of a man committed to truth and sacrifice. We follow a cast of characters that includes the Russian evolutionist and anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin; the Scottish economist Adam Smith, who taught that the invisible hand of the market leveled all, and all creatures acted in their own self-interest; the Hungarian mathematical genius and father of game theory, John von Neumann; Thomas Malthus, who preached that inevitably the human race would reproduce itself into numbers that the world's food supply could not sustain; the "greatest Darwinian since Darwin," Bill Hamilton; John Maynard Keynes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, the economists of the Chicago School of Economics (where Price studied): Milton Friedman and several other Nobel Prize winners; the Beatles, and many others. We learn about Konrad Lorenz, whom the ducklings followed, the prisoner's dilemma, and the tragedy of the village common.

The book at hand examines the effort of science to fathom the mystery of genuine kindness. Harman, who has a doctorate from Oxford University, is chair of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Bar Ilan University in Israel. He is the author of The Man Who Invented the Chromosome: A Life of Cyril Darlington,a documentary filmmaker, and a regular contributor to "The New Republic." He lives in Tel Aviv and New York City. In this book, he combines clear science writing with an empathetic portrait of Price's brilliance, and ultimate downfall. Mind you, I didn't find the book easy reading: I've very little background in mathematics or science, and found the theorems, and the mathematics, difficult to follow. I also found the great parade of names of scientists, economists, psychologists, etc., and all of their backgrounds and lives, difficult to follow: I recognized the better-known names, of course. But I kept slogging through, largely because the author had hooked my interest in Price in the first chapters, and I wanted to know what happened to him. So, easy reading it's not. Rewarding reading, it can be.

I enjoyed this book. It was reasonably well written, not didactic but more like a detective story though rather more Chandleresque in its foggy denouement than a cleared up case for Sherlock Holmes. The story is of interpretations of Charles Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection and alongside this in alternate chapters a biography of one George Price who plays an important part in modern interpretations of evolution. The story begins at the end of the nineteenth century with the two opposing views of Darwin's theory. One interpretation advocates nature is red in tooth and claw, all is cruel and the selfish individual is the fittest of the so called survivors of natures struggle of existence. The other interpretation argues on the contrary that altruism exists in nature, that the individual in some cases sacrifices themselves for the group or that the individual helps the group with expectation of reciprocity. Well this started off a debate which is told in a somewhat garbled though entertaining way in this book. I say garbled but that just maybe because I found the writers style a little verbose and his explanations of the findings of various scientists curt. There is some humour in the telling and many diverting characters, anecdotes and interesting ideas put in the book too. George Price's life on the other hand is a fairly standard narrative and becomes somewhat detailed towards the end of the life and the book as if his work and the story of evolution and his life had some connection of motivation or cause and effect. But I couldn't find it. Still the idea that cultural, political, social and individual character can shape scientific theory is pretty much the subtext of much of the whole story of this book and it may be a useful thing when it comes to evolution which is in the scheme of things a young theory and one which gross misinterpretation and manipulation has underpinned things like eugenics and the holocaust. The fashion for taking ideas or perspectives from science and directly spinning them into modern culture can also be seen in quantum theory and relativity respectively when these were first declared unto the world in the 1920's and so on. Still this book is a worthwhile read, stimulating, compassionate and humourous not taking itself too seriously. It had me asking questions about science today and big topics like evolution and their impact.