The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness by Dugatkin Lee Alan

Author:Dugatkin, Lee Alan [Dugatkin, Lee Alan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781400841431
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

The Price of Kinship

AFTER HE RETURNED from Brazil in 1964, Bill Hamilton worked as a researcher at Imperial College’s field station in Berkshire. This facility, called Silwood Park, had a stellar reputation for insect ecology and population biology, but it housed very few evolutionary biologists. So, when a lectureship in genetics opened at the London campus of Imperial College, Hamilton applied for the job. He obtained the position “with ridiculous ease.” English institutions of higher learning were expanding rapidly in the early 1960s, and, as Hamilton remembers it, “jobs for academics almost fell from the trees.”1

Unable to afford a house on the meager salary that a lecturer at Imperial College received, Hamilton moved into a small flat owned by Blue Star Garages Limited, and looked “out on their emblem reared over a filling station”2 every time he peered out his window. The location of his office, however, made up for the view from home, for it was situated smack in the center of an entomological golden triangle—the Royal Entomology Society was one hundred yards away at 41 Queens Gate, a few steps further down the road was the Commonwealth Institute of Entomology,3 and, across the street lay the British Museum. For a man who preferred to spend time in the woods watching his beloved insects, it is hard to imagine an urban setting that Bill Hamilton would have appreciated more.

Hamilton kept busy at Imperial College, constantly sharpening his skills as a theoretician. Shortly after “The Genetical Theory of Social Behavior, Parts I and II” appeared in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, he published the first mathematical model for the evolution of aging, again in JTB. This model shifted the emphasis on senescence from a mechanistic-based approach that equated aging with “breaking down” to one in which natural selection continuously pushes deleterious traits back in development.4 A year later he revolutionized the theory of sex ratios in a landmark paper in Science. Hamilton’s mathematical model of sex ratios demonstrated that although a 1:1 (female:male) sex ratio was often favored by natural selection, there were conditions under which selection would favor the sex ratio in a population being heavily biased toward females.5 Between 1964 and 1975, Hamilton also published a new model examining the evolution of group living,6 as well as a number of papers and book chapters on kinship and altruism.7

In time, the depth and breadth of these papers would establish him as one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the twentieth century. Yet, despite the demonstration of his talent as a theoretician, the late 1960s and early 1970s were not all that Hamilton had hoped they would be. With some notable exceptions that we shall return to later, until the mid-1970s, not many people seemed to take notice of his kinship papers. One person who did notice, however, was an enigmatic, unknown genius named George Price.

George Price was four years old when his father died in 1926. His widowed mother—a former opera singer and actress—did her best to keep the family’s lighting company afloat, but it was rough going.

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