The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness by Harman Oren

Author:Harman, Oren [Harman, Oren]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

Excerpts from George Price’s seminal paper in Nature

10

“Coincidence” Conversion

Munich never materialized, but in May a turn arrived as unexpected as it was welcome. “I am enchanted with your formula,” the usually lugubrious Hamilton had written in a hurried script, barely able to contain his excitement. “I really have a clearer picture of the selection process as a result. In its general form I can see how we might use your formula to investigate “‘group selection.’”1

It was quite an about face for a man who had judged group selection as so “wooly” an abstraction that it could be safely omitted from the tool kit of the evolutionist. Altruistic behavior was disadvantageous within groups; to evolve it would require groups fighting among each other. Kin selection, therefore, could not be an alternative to group selection: Both existed in nature’s plan and needed to be related to each other. Accordingly Hamilton had taken George up on spite, and, in the process, devised a foolproof stratagem. It was a piece of trickery that made him especially proud: He would send his article on spite to Nature, wait for its acceptance, and then write to its editor, Maddox, to say that he would have to withdraw since it was entirely based on the covariance math of George Price, whose paper—in case Maddox forgot—had been rejected by him in February. Hamilton would, of course, be happy for “Selfishness and Spiteful Behaviour in an Evolutionary Model” to appear in Nature but not until the status of Dr. Price’s article was finally resolved. A masterstroke of subterfuge, a coup of cunning and guile, amazingly, it worked. George’s letter to the editor, Nature soon replied, would be published as an article, “Selection and Covariance.”2

Walking home that day from UCL, as usual, George eyed the All Souls spire jutting up above the buildings. It was constructed of seventeen concave sides encircled by twelve Corinthian columns, the capitals Ionic in design, made from Coade stone, and the winged heads of the cherubs based on a design by Michelangelo. Three large clocks beneath the columns counted the minutes and hours with black and golden Hermle spade hands. The spire was a perfect cone, as sharp as it seemed foreboding, fearless in the way it pierced the overcast sky. As he turned from narrow Riding House Street into Little Titchfield, George began wondering about his luck, and, in particular, about coincidences.

Later he would write that the “coincidences” that forced him to convert were on the order of 1/1030, odds so fleetingly miniscule that he simply had no choice but to “give in and admit that God existed.”3 “About the beginning of June,” he wrote to his brother, Edison, in the fall, trying to explain,

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