Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness

And so tonight I'm pleased to welcome Oren Harman. He joins us to speak on his book The Price of altruism. George Price and the search for the origins of kindness of the price of altruism The Economist writes ever since Charles Darwin had published his theory of evolution in 1859 scientists had wondered whether it could can explain the existence of all tourism. Price wanted to describe mathematically how a genetic disposition to altruism could evolve. As Mr. Hartman so vividly describes price ultimately became one of the vagabonds he set out to save and from the New York Times. This is a book for anyone interested in the question first posed by Darwin himself himself of how we ended up with so much kindness in a natural world customarily depicted as red in tooth and claw. Pryce struggled with it on an intensely personal level. His story is highly relevant at a time when greed as the basis of society has lost much of its appeal. Mr. Horan studied at Oxford and Harvard University and specialized in the history and philosophy of modern biology. Evolutionary theory the evolution of all truism 20th century genetics and historical biography. He is a frequent contributor to The New Republic and the co-creator of the Israeli Oscar

nominated documentary series did Hirzel really say that previous works include the man who invented the chromosome and rebels Mavericks and heretics of biology. We are thrilled to have him with us tonight so you please join me in welcoming more in harmony. So thanks a lot for coming out here on this warm evening. And it's I'm very happy to see some old friends of mine in the audience. So that's a special pleasure. This book really deals with the question of the origins of kindness. Where do acts of sacrifice come from. And this is a problem that people have been thinking about from the beginning of time and there are different and different answers come from different traditions. So many religious traditions posit the notion of a God who

breed morality into humans creating us in His own image. The secular traditions talk about philosophical deliberation and coming upon morality or virtue via reason. Early economists looking at the market tried to figure out the logic would seem miasma like of cooperation being born of selfish interest given in the words of the 18th century poet. Every part full of vice the whole mass of paradise. How does that work. And then for the first time in the 1930s scientists started thinking about this problem too and in particular Charles Darwin whom this lady seems to like especially

and Charles Darwin immediately noticed that that there was a there was a great paradox in altruism because how was one to explain the persistence of altruistic traits traits which reduce fitness. If evolution is a story of survival of the fittest it makes no sense it's a paradox. And Darwin in fact wrote that if he couldn't explain this paradox then his theory was worth nothing. This was the greatest riddle and the greatest challenge to Darwin's own theory. And Darwin had an explanation he said that it was good for the community. He considered in particular the case of the sting of the honey bee sting sacrificing itself by stinging and then losing its end trails in order to protect the hive. He thought that this was a type of behavior which could evolve because it was good for the community. Later on this kind of theory was called Group selection or group group selection theory and until this very day it remains a hotly contested subject but ever

since Darwin. Many scientists of different ilk and of different disciplines have tried their hand at this problem and so ecologists economists mathematicians geneticists behaviorists psychologists have have over this span of one hundred fifty years and fifty years and in fact still currently probably into the future for many years continue to try to to try to fathom this great mystery of kindness. So the book is called The Price of altruism and it's a kind of double entendres you might have imagined because there is a face of a man on the cover of the book so there is a man by the name of George Price who is at the center of the story but before I tell you about him I'd like to introduce some of the characters who played a role in in the grander history because in fact the book is sort of kind of two books in one it's it's the story of 150 years of attempts to try to crack the problem of

altruism. And then it's the story of a particular man who at a certain point in his life. I'll tell you about sort of entered into this debate and made of a very sort of dramatic intervention. So before I talk about price I thought since this is a reading and someone told me that you're supposed to read a little bit of the reading so I won't read too much. Never would it. So as I said a lot of the characters aren't credit turns out are incredibly colorful and eccentric characters. So I'm going to I'm just going to introduce the three of them as sort of kind of biographical sketches. And the first is the Russian and artist Prince Peter Kropotkin. So here is Kropotkin. He would wait until dusk. That would be the best time to slip away

unnoticed as he's back to Smallville ECE memories of his animated talk on the glacial formations of Finland and Russia at the Geographical Society the previous evening still lingered in his mind. It had gone well he thought. The country's leading geologist Barbara Marni had spoken up in his favor. It was even propose that he be nominated president of the physical geography section of the society. Years of journeying to the frozen hearts of faraway places had finally paid off. But now he must concentrate. Now he must flee. He would better go by the service staircase one of the servant girls whispered. A horse drawn carriage stood at the gate he jumped in. The cabby whipped the horse and turned into Nevsky Prospekt the magicked majestic Avenue planned by Peter the Great in the city that called itself by his name. It was a short ride to the rail station and from there please the spirits to freedom. Russia was a vast land and in the remoteness of its eastern ex-Penn says it was his intention to start a land league like the ones that would become so powerful in Ireland

in the years just ahead. It was the beginning of spring. Eight hundred seventy four. Suddenly a second cab got galloped by. To his great surprise there in its carriage was one of the two weavers who had been arrested the week before waving his hand at him. Perhaps he had been released he thought and has an important communication to make to me dully he ordered the cabbie to stop but before he could greet the weaver a second man sitting beside him appeared. Two years of clandestine meetings disguises and sleeping in other people's beds had come to an end. Jumping into his carriage the second man a detective cried out. Mr Broad in Prince reporting I arrest you. Later that night in the bowels of the infamous third section a gendarme Colonel solemnly read the charge. You are accused of having belonged to a secret society which has for its object the overflow overthrow of the existing form of government and of conspiracy against the sacred person of his Imperial Majesty. For Prince Peter Alexei of its crippled King

spurred in the game was finally up. So this is this is one of the first characters who comes into the story and he's an interesting character because he. His interlocutor is is Darwin's bulldog. Thomas Henry Huxley. It's amazing how these two men who who both follow Darwin and revere Darwin interpreted Darwin's theory in completely opposite manners. So Huxley who was sort of a corporatist and had dug have dug dug his himself up from from it's kind of the dregs of Victorian living viewed nature in the hullabaloo of the of the tropics and what he saw Tennyson was that nature was one big struggle. It was red in tooth and claw. It was a story of competition and of warfare. And so when he was thinking about what kind of moral conclusions man can draw from the picture of nature which lay before him. He said luckily man is the

only species who can who can act against his own nature who can rebel against nature. And so what we need to do is to look at nature and then take a 180 and just run in the other direction morally do exactly the opposite whereas kapok looked at nature in Siberia where often since the elements are so difficult animals the organisms are not competing against each other but they're rather trying to fight against the elements which often leads to cooperation and so provoking thought that that the origin of virtue or sort of the cradle of cooperation was to be found in nature. So anything that had to do with sort of laws politics power was what was going to get us into trouble. And so this turned him to the anarchy. He became one of the great anarchist having having concluded that the precise opposite conclusion from what Huxley had

about where morals come from. So he's he's one of the first figures let me introduce you to a second figure a man who of whom it was said that he was the master last man to know everything. Or alternatively the last man to know everything there is to know which is something different. But whichever way you want to be as holding. His men in the elite Scottish Black Watch brigade known for its fierceness and tartan kilts dubbed the obviously somewhat touch lieutenant in charge of charge of grenades and mortars. The Rajah of bomb a self-initiated solo raids into no man's land a makeshift bomb workshop and the time he drove a bicycle across the gap in front of the unbelieving eyes of the German Germans having calculated the that the enemy's incredulity would assure his safety. All made plain what Bombo holding himself admitted he was having a ball in war. And so when he clambered into the Prince of Wales's car after having been blasted Albers

it would not be the last time he was wounded. J.B. S was cock sure and entitled his zeal for battle was so great that he was once pushed mid action into a ditch by his own gunners. An enthused about the retaliatory fire his imminent Mordor would draw on their battery. Still his men respected him revered him even with his imposing frame premature balding head massive forward and Celtic warrior like moustache he looked like an alert war walrus in a skirt. It was it was alternately comical and blood calling what other officer in the trenches was writing a scientific paper with his sister describing one of the first ever examples of genetic linkage in mammals. What other officer as a confidence building measure made made smoking compulsory in his bomb making workshop. He was selecting out the faint hearted. And what officer had been hurriedly called away at the behest of his uncle the Lord Chancellor in order to put his mind to that of his fathers in a makeshift lab and in St. on air. The quicker to

meet the challenge of German gas attacks on allied forces in Belgium. Whole days men had heard many Oxford stories. How in 1913 blacklegs had been hired by them by the municipality to replace the striking horse tram drivers with their services provided the drivers demanded demands went on Met and successive attempts to one heart one on harness the stand in horses were defeated by baton wielding bobbies until J.B. s came along that is marching up and down Corner Market Street solo and in solidarity with the workers chanting Death unease and creed and the Latin psalm or at the root of it CT Cor M.. Jack drew a crowd blowing the blacklegs and allowing the strikers to set loose their horses. A scene stealing cameo role a feat of memory a lengthy canonical Latin quotation a snow cockpit authority and an Oxonian irony. With this piece of street theater J.B. s establish his modus operandi. The university fined him two guineas. It was the

first case for over three centuries. Holden boasted when a man was punished in Oxford for publicly professing the principles of the Church of England. So Holden is another great character who plays a role in this larger story of trying to crack the mystery of altruism and he's famous perhaps for for saying that sort of in a drunken stupor over a beer in a pub that he would give his life for two brothers and eight cousins which is basically the logic of the genes genes point of view about altruism. If you think of altruism from the point of view of the gene and genetic relatedness then it actually sometimes makes sense to sacrifice yourself if in fact you're helping a relative in whose body the very same genes that you carry will now be propagated into future generations. The last caricature character that I'd like to introduce before I talk about George Price a bit is the one

Gary in math I'm a mathematician mathematician and genius Johnny Newman. John even Newman could divide eight digit numbers in his head by the time he was six. Visitors to the Budapest family home of the successful Jewish banker Max Newman were as stunned by his son's ability to memorize phone books as by the jokes he told in classical Greek when he grew older he studied chemical engineering physics and mathematics at Europe's finest universities Berlin Toric. What a pest Gottingen. Soon the word was out. But Newman was a genius. By 1930 at twenty six he was sitting in the room next to Albert Einstein's at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton. Einstein's mind they said was slow and contemplative. He would think about something for years. Johnny's mind was just the opposite. It was lightning quick stunningly fast. If you gave him a problem he either solved it right away or not at all. Unsolvable problems were rare though living with his wife

daughter and an Irish Setter in verse at a Princeton mansion on 26 Wescott Road Fund Newman was famous for hosting lavish weekly alcohol fuming parties and even more for scribbling mathematical formulas with pencil and paper in the middle of it all. The noise or his wife said the better. He wore prim vested suits with a white handkerchief in the pocket and outfit just enough out of place to inspire pleasantries. But Newman was balding and Porky. His diet consisted of yogurt and hard boiled eggs for breakfast and anything he wanted for the rest of the day. He loved fast cars hard liquor classical music and dirty jokes. He was a prankster once he offered to take kind Einstein to the Princeton train station and then put him on a train in the opposite direction. He was known for scribbling equations on the blackboard blackboard in a frenzy erasing them before students could get to the end. Clara his wife claimed that he wouldn't remember what he had for lunch but could recall word for word books he had read 20 years before he had produced groundbreaking

papers and logic set theory group theory or Gothic theory in operator theory. He had described the single memory architecture of the modern computer. And perform the crucial calculation on the implosion design of the atom bomb. Alongside these accomplishments he love toys and would have been was observed unaffectedly scraping with a five year old over a set of building blocks on a carpet. Though he was charming and witty in public few felt that they really knew him well. People joked that John von Neumann was not human but a demi god who could imitate humans precisely. So John von Neumann also figures in the grander story because it turns out that game theory which was a fear which John von Neumann first wrote about in the early part of the century is a very a very useful and powerful tool for trying to understand the logic of animal behavior and also more generally of biological

behavior at different levels of the biological hierarchy. So he's another figure that that figures in this grander tale. But now let's get to George Price himself. So George Price was a man who was born in New York in 1982 and killed himself in a squat in London in the winter of 1975 and for most of his life he had nothing to do whatsoever with the problem of altruism. He was sort of like a kind of Forrest Gump figure so working on the Manhattan Project as a chemist and uranium enrichment on the atom bomb at the University of Chicago in the 40s then takes a completely complete sort of 90 degree turn begins working on transistor research in the midst of the communications revolutions with people like Shockley and Bardeen the father of information theory of Claude Shannon at Bell Labs

solves some particular problem there and then sort of disappears like a phantom and begins working at a medical center on cancer research comes up with a with an incredible incredibly sort of insightful discovery there leaves that. And for a career of. Punditry is as as a writer writing about the Cold War and then invents computer aided design cad but doesn't take a patent out and joins IBM as a sort of low level low rung worker and then of course IBM makes billions with this with this invention. George Price was very brilliant but not a very good businessman. And then after all of this had happened. George Price found out that he had thyroid cancer. This is in the 60s in America and he has an operation the operation is successful from the point of

view of the cancer but it's less than successful from the point of view of his very kinetic lifestyle so he's left with sort of one arm and once one shoulder slightly disabled. And this throws them into a deep deep depression and he thinks that life is not worth living. He had already left his family but he now decides that he's going to really abandon his two little daughters. He's going to leave his job at IBM. He's going to leave his country and he's going to move to England and try one crack at one last grand problem. And that is the great mystery ever since Darwin of the evolution of altruism. And so he travels across the Atlantic and he takes an apartment at Oxford Circus and he begins to read the relevant papers on altruism in the late opening libraries. But of course he hasn't been trained in this he has no training as a biologist with it and so he doesn't understand everything that he's reading but he does perceive that the most important person writing

on the subject is a man. Bill Hamilton another character I didn't introduce him but he's he was often referred to as sort of the the greatest Darwinian since Darwin. And he writes to Bill Hamilton and he says to him allow me to introduce myself my name is George Price and I've come to solve the problem of altruism and Hamilton had no idea who this guy was obviously. But was a gentleman and said By all means here is a reprint. I'm on my way to the jungles of Brazil to study social wasps. Good luck. And then probably forgot about him altogether. Six months later Hamilton returns to England from Brazil and he finds on his desk what becomes known as the The Price equation. And immediately notices or almost immediately notices that this is

an unbelievable insight into the problem of altruism. Because what it does price out. Hamilton himself had written sort of a mathematical proof of a very short little mathematical formula which tells you. That altruism can evolve but it can only evolve as nepotism. This is what's called the Hamilton equation or kin selection it was given the name can selection by John mean Art Smith and this is a notion it's a very very simple mathematical equation and goes RB greater than c r is genetic relatedness B is benefit and C is cost. So if the related in this the genetic relatedness between any two organisms times the benefit that one organism gets from the other from the other organism is greater than the cost in the out of the of the what the altruism is paying. The obvious is paying then the behavior can evolve. And what this meant was that altruism was always very circumscribed it could only happen sort of as a function of

nepotism. But what Hamilton saw when he looked at George's equation was that it didn't it didn't necessitate genetic relatedness the equation was a generalization of Hamilton's can selection mathematics what it said was that you could actually get the evolution of altruism without genetic relatedness. So you can see this ism as it's sort of. It widens the scope of the possibilities of kindness to us to a very great degree and so this was a this was a big deal and Hamilton immediately recognized it. Now what has happened in the interim was when Hamilton was still in the jungles. Pryce wrote the equation and it was a very short in a very beautiful equation. And he walked off the street into the genetics department at University College London and he showed it to a professor and he said is this new. The professor didn't know him but he looked at the math. And within about five minutes

he gave Christ the keys to an office and a honorary professorship at what it what was what at that time one of the best genetics departments in the world. It was very unusual. And Price went home and started thinking about what had just happened. And I said he was a Forrest Gump character but he's also sort of a Rain Man kind of character. He was probably somewhere on the spectrum of a very high functioning autist. And so numbers meant a lot to him so he so he started thinking about why it was that he should have come up with this equation because it seemed to him very unlikely that if all the great minds since Darwin are trying to crack this problem he should've come up with this equation with absolutely no training in the field and so forth. And so he began thinking about. About other coincidences that have happened to him in his lifetime. Very strange kinds of coincidences because he had a very kind of strange kind of mind things like he'd

had four girlfriends whose name was Ann the seem to him very strange. The last four digits in his phone number were 2 3 9 9 which to his mind meant a moment before midnight even though it should be 2 3 5 9 but for him it was 2 3 9 9 and another coincidences and he basically multiplied them and the result was something on the order of 1 divided by 10 to the 30. It was an astronomical number and made no sense that all of these coincidences should have happened to him and so he drew the only conclusion which he which a rationalist like himself could draw and so he ran out of his apartment at Oxford Circus into the church at All Souls at Langham and became an evangelical Christian on the spot. Having come to the conclusion that he was obviously chosen by God to tell some great truth to humanity namely where does kindness come from. And this is where sort of the second drama of the book occurs

because at this stage Christ began to think about the philosophical meanings of his of his equation. And to his mind what it meant that one could write a mathematical formula explaining the evolution of kindness what that meant about it about altruism itself about the trait being explained was that it was never pure The benevolence was never pure it was always interested. Whether it was working at the level of the gene or the cell or the individual or the group or the lineage there was always some ulterior motive because this was an action which was being selected for within the confines of selection theory of Darwin's theory. And so and so the goodness was never pure. And what this meant to him again to his sort of this is an unnecessary conclusion so don't don't become depressed or anything like that was that there really could never be true selflessness in the world.

And it was a terrible realization and one which he was not about to accept without a fight. And so he decided in the sense to try to beat his own mathematics to try to beat the very miracle that had happened to him with this great insight. And this led him to the streets of London where he began to approach homeless people introduce himself say my name is George how can I help you. Can I maybe get you a sandwich maybe give you a pound. And and this kind of these kinds of acts of kindness then graduated to a full blown program of radical altruism and radical selflessness. So at one point he had invited about five or six homeless people into his home. Many of them were or were sort of alcoholics and violent types almost all of them were taking advantage of him. And he knew it but he was happy for it because it meant that he was beating his own science. And there's a very poignant letter where he writes to John may not Smith is one of the great Evolutionists of the

age alongside Bill Hamilton and he says John I'm down to my last 15 pee and I can't wait to give them away because this meant to him that that true self-assessed really did exist. The ending is rather grim because what happens is is he he does give away everything and is left with nothing and so he is forced to leave his own home and begins living on the streets. And soon enough is down to skin and bones and Hamilton and may not Smith are trying to save him because they really they are the two only people in the world who sort of really understand what he's done in terms of the Darwin's great mystery. But alas he kills himself in a in a squat in in the winter of 1975 in London and until this very day he he rests in an unmarked grave in St

Pancras. The first scene of the book is his funeral where there are about 10 or 11 people six of whom are homeless people sort of his last companions on the streets who wanted to show their final respects to this man whom they loved very much because he had sort of descended on them like an angel almost. And then the two greatest. Evolutionists of the era. John may not Smith and Bill Hamilton who are not on speaking terms of one another so it was quite a dramatic ending just before we open it up to questions if you have any questions I'd like to say because this is it is a sort of rather grim and tragic. But there is a silver lining to the story I think which is probably even more important now that George Price is already beneath the ground. And that is that in many ways George's own life reflects

sort of the basic fundamental problem of altruism itself. And and I think obviously George was not the sort of quote unquote normal. He thinking that he had been chosen by God. He often he often decided not to take his thyroid medicine because if he would not if he didn't take his medicine and continue to live then that would be a sure sign that God had chosen him and so forth so and we know that when you don't take your thyroid medicine you could fall into depressions and this obviously played a role in his suicide. But another thing which which definitely played a role which I found in letters and so forth was the price. In the end I couldn't understand what his true motivations were in this program of utter radical selflessness. In this in the end he couldn't accept this because what because what it meant was again that you couldn't you could never know. You know where

whether whether acts of kindness come from a very pure and beloved benevolent place you know cynics say scratch an altruist and watch watch a NEGUS bleed or you know something like that. And George Price just couldn't understand why he was doing what he was doing and what that meant to him was that science could never explain pure selflessness. But I think this is a rather hopeful sort of there's a rather hopeful message in this and that is that. Sort of as powerful a tool as science is to understand the world around us and it is and if you read the book you'll see it's an incredibly powerful tool I mean mathematics helps us see that if you're a mite and your genetic relatedness to a second might is three 14th then we can predict this this mount this amount of altruism which will be different if your genetic relatedness is for 14th to the Second Life. I mean it's a

very science can do unbelievable things. But on the other hand there is a point where sort of the fillip already of science sort of and and cannot kind of crawl further. There are particular kinds of questions which science cannot address sort of in a bit constrained rode in the truck thought to say that even after we've we've answered all the questions that we can possibly posit we still will not have begun to scratch the problems that we really care about deeply. And this is the point where we have to pass into silence. So in a way George Price's own life is is is kind of a very. A dramatic realisation of the notion that where science ends and matters of the Spirit begin. That's where that's where poetry and art take over. And so this is really besides being the tale of

of the quest human kind's modern quest took to crack the problem of where kindness comes from and a biography of a man who played a very important role in this in this in this quest. It's also a book about sort of what science can and cannot tell us about matters of the Spirit. So I guess I'll be happy to answer questions if anyone has any. At this stage. Thanks. Right so what the gentleman is referring to is at a certain point George Price was in correspondence with about five Nobel laureates each in different fields. And he was he was trying to sort of prove to each one that he had come up with some great discovery one of them had to do with the physiology of vision. And like you said he thought that it had something to with the cells. And again most people thought he was a crank he was. He was. He was then he was corresponding with Echols was a Nobel laureate. But when someone

comes out of nowhere with no real sort of you know institutional affiliation people tend to get to take these kind of people not it not as seriously. But you're right in terms of the papers a small fraction of George places papers were donated to the British Museum. But that but the vast majority of the papers exist in the dens of the two daughters and a Marine Kathleen one in Solana Beach just north of San Diego and the other in San Francisco. So I took to write this book I really had to first gain the confidence of the two sisters and it turned out that a lot of people who had tried to gain their confidence and like their father they were slightly unusual. And so I was very lucky to be able to gain their confidence and I'll just tell you a small little story which which is indicative. I was walking with one of the sisters along sort of near her home in Solana Beach in a car passed us by and she said oh that's strange. And I

say what's strange she said the license plate 2 7 5 3 5 6. If you divide that number by 56 and substract subtract 217 that's my phone number. And so clearly she had. She she had something from her father and she says about herself I'm too old to have been diagnosed with Asperger's but it had I'd been born 40 years later I'm positive that I would have been been diagnosed with Asperger's and ensure that my dad was too. He had a very interesting childhood his dad was a lighting expert in the theater district in New York in the teens in the 20s so he'd lit the stages of the law school sort of you know the great impresario who brought Madame Butterfly to New York in English. And the English language for the first time and his mother was sort of a failed actress. And they met on the stage when the when the father was doing the lighting and she was trying to act and fell in love.

It was one of the last course stage actually. And that was around 19 17 or something like that. And soon afterwards a brother with a son was born and a few years after that. George was born one thousand twenty two and four years after that the father died. His name was William Addison price and that was in his book that was in the name he was born with. He was his name was price. His parents had come from Russia to Chicago in the 1880s but he wanted to sort of invent himself anew in America and so he called himself William Edison. And the mother who found herself with two very young boys just as the market fell. And so the creditors were all sort of at her neck and she had no inkling for business. And it turned out when she started looking at the books that her husband had even less of an inkling he was a vet he had many patents to his name but he didn't make any money from them because he was just all over the place.

It turned out just in parenthesis that the older George's older brother whose name is Addison price. Ended up going into the family business and he invented tract lighting and he worked with great architects like I am payin Buckminster Fuller. So it's a very unusual family in that in that sense but so the mother was was it was with these two young young kids trying to struggle to keep keep the business alive and to help educate her kids so she would send the older brother to a farm of sort of the Van Aken farm in upstate New York because that that meant that she had an extra room in the in the house to left usually to sort of Japanese gentleman for $7 a week and that was substantial. And George. I was admitted to the Stuyvesant school which was sort of the school for the clever kids who

didn't have money to go to the private schools in New York and of a class of eight hundred and two he was second in his class and he actually came to Harvard to interview. And the I got this from the archives here at Harvard. The people who interviewed him their conclusion was. May go haywire but will never be humdrum. When he was 17 years old so they actually really kind of caught it on the button. He spent a year here before he was kicked out and then went to the University of Chicago. OK so the sorts of motivations are very complicated. Who would have known. So there are many motivations one is a scientific one. Because I I sort of think that the notion of multi-level selection I'm a proponent of multi-level selection not everyone is. And and so this book is sort by by way of paying homage to George Price is

also motivated by wanting to sort of champion the idea of multi level selection which is the notion that selection is sort of this giant i perusing nature and it can see every level in the biological hierarchy simultaneously at the same time. So a lot of the people tried to answer this question and said you know the thought that the key to answering the question of where kindness come from comes from had to do with figuring out at what level selection is working and people said it's either we're you know working with the level of the gene or it's working at the level of the individual or the group. And what George Price is mathematics tells you is that it's actually working at all levels all the time. So there was a scientific motivation behind the book. But then but there was also sort of an artistic motivation and that is that I found that I was very interested in the problem in the in the science of it. You know who is interested about you know in where kindness comes from. And I found that.

By using the biography of a man who led a very unusual life and had a very deep penetration and very deep insight into this problem from the point of view of the craft of writing that one could use his own biography to sort of kind of riff reflect the bones of the problem of altruism itself. And so much of his life he had nothing to do with the problem of altruism but a lot of the themes in his life were directly related to the themes that have to do with the problem of altruism itself. And so I find I found that to be a really interesting challenge from the point of view of writing and. That was the motivation. Plus it's a great story I mean it's just an it's an unusual story. I mean I I had known the price equation and I knew someone had written something small about

George. But this man who wrote an equation that had something to do with altruism and then killed himself. But it was unclear what the story was and it sounded to me like you know like a film this is unbelievable. There was there was some kind of connection between the equation and why he killed himself. And so it was a very compelling story to begin with. None of the none of the scientists that I discuss here did. But George Price's brother Edison was really into meditation and yoga yoga and. Ben Price himself George himself made fun of his brother. You know I was like just go mad at it you know leave me alone. So George wasn't inclined to. George was a true rationalist. I mean he was such a rationalist that rationalism had drove him to God and to the notion that he had been chosen you know to tell humanity a great great truth. So he wasn't of that cast of mind. Well he married

he sort of had a knack for making the wrong decision all the time. He was very good at that. And so he married of a very religious Roman Catholic woman which was a strange choice for someone who thought that you know the notion of a deity was complete malarkey and very quickly that marriage broke up. And obviously in sort of the first part of his life when he was still in the United States he was not a good father. He was a terrible father. In England when he found God he suddenly felt an enormous amount of remorse and he wrote a letter to his wife and to his to his daughters apologizing and weeping on the page and asking his wife to come to England to marry him again a second time this is 20 years after they divorced and.

The wife came but she decided not to marry him. I don't know why either. So he was very remorseful and so in a way in a way his turn to sort of this radical program of altruism is just it's just the flipside of the kind of radical egoist he was before he happened on this equation and then went crazy. He was sort of on a mission to turn his friends and family into Christians. And so Hamilton who was the man who understood the mathematics of the price equation price thought that Hamilton had the cast of mind because he had understood this equation to find signs in the Bible that price was looking for. This was right after his co-incidence conversion before his love conversion. And so he was secretly trying to turn Hamilton who was an incredible

atheist into into a Christian because he thought that he would be helpful in finding the signs that God was surely presenting for Humanity and you just had to know where to look and how to look. The toughest part was finding the sort of the people on the streets who knew George Price. So in different ways I feel I was able I was lucky enough to find some of them the guys I come from Israel and the two guys who are living with George Price in the squad who happened to be two young Israeli bohemians who had just finished the Army and were in London and sort of kind of hanging out. And so I tracked them down and they told me the story because they discovered his body one of them was actually working as a security guard at the consulate. The Israeli consulate. And so he would wake up early in the morning and to go to work. And the more this this particular morning he he went down the stairs and he saw a letter

sort of peeping into him beneath the door. And he was sure that it was an eviction letter because they were all living there sort of illegally and he squats. But he didn't know how to read English English so he ran up the steps to to ask George to read the letter for him. And then knocked on the door and sort of the door sort of opened a bit and he pushed a little bit more and saw that the entire living room floor was was bloodied and then found George sort of slouched there with his nicest clothes in a pair of scissors in his hand in his hand so. The sources are varied. They come from papers of scientists they come from George's George's own papers as I mentioned earlier that were actually rescued by Bill Hamilton after George killed himself he fought his way into the squat and rescued the papers and sent them to America to the family. And then you know different colleagues that you know who sort of norm at UCL and people who were part of

something called the the gang told us was a was a tenement which was going to be knocked down by by a man by the name of Simon Levy who was trying to sort of kick out all of the old the old inhabitants of the neighborhood and build build large buildings and make make a lot of money. And so there was a gang of people who were sort of you know squatter kind of professional squatters who were fighting these fighting Levy and through the end they stayed in touch for many years. They're still friends so I found one of them and I found the rest and that helped me piece together the last days of George's life. I'll give you an example. There's an A B amoeba called this cotillion Discordian and this amoeba is a single celled organism which is autonomous it's

an individual and it lives on the forest floor and it's normally quite happy in the forest floor except for when resources begin to dwindle and there isn't much food. When that happens this amoeba which as I said is it's it's an individual it's an autonomous individual emits a chemical signal acyclic ANP which creates a gradient. And so all of that of the amoeba in the forest begin converging on this gradient and they come together they create a blob. And the blob itself turns into a slug. Which is now an autonomous individual. So you've had individuals who were autonomous single celled now creating a creature which is created that they are now cells in the body of this creature. And this log has sensors for wind and for and for light. And so it's kind of

shimmies on its way on the forest floor until it senses these things. At this point the top 20 percent of the slug create out of their own body a stalk which allows the the bottom 80 percent to kind of shimmy up the stalk and create an orb at the top of the stalk it looks like a lollipop. And now these 80 percent at the top have a greater chance of being carried away by a felicitous wing or sort of on the legs or the or the wings of an insect on an unsuspecting insect to a place where the resources are more plentiful. So what's happened is that the the top 20 percent. Have actually sacrificed themselves for the bottom 80 percent. And this is an enemy. It's incredible. So this this would seem to say that you know under certain conditions amoeba can be incredibly altruistic except in answer to your question that a husband and wife team looking at this particular member just last year showed

that this isn't all that it isn't all that Ultra Stick as we think perhaps it might be less outer skin than we think because all of these amoeba are on the fourth floor are actually clones of each other. They're identical. So what happens when you take two groups of amoeba that are of different species and you create this gradient and allow them to converge on the gradient. Well what happens is that these formerly incredibly altruistic amoeba now partake in incredible fighting for who will be in the top 80 percent who will be in the end. And so these really kind amoeba now turn into these kind of like nationalist fascists they're now fighting that the other so. So the the problem of the evolution of kindness is is directly related to the to the level that the level of the higher of of the biological hierarchy. And often really what sets this problem aside is that this is a type of problem where there is a conflict between

the interest of one level versus the interest of another level. The difficult problem in terms of biology is to figure out the conditions where you can move from. One level to the next graduate from one level to the next so that you can have a kind of super organism where altruism of outs so that people like your Wilson here at Harvard work on this problem to try to figure out the precise conditions and in fact the price equation is a very powerful tool for allowing you to figure out such conditions. So do so Darwin. Darwin was lacking two tools that ended up being very important in solving this problem one was mathematics and the other was a theory of heredity. He didn't know our oddity worked. But like on many other issues Darwin had a great great scientist's intuition. And so the notion that this was for the greater good was sort of described by him in a very non formal way but ended up

being formalized years later with tools that he did not have. And being in ended up being a very important idea. In terms of spirituality and you you have to remember there are two different definitions of altruism. One is biological altruism which is based soley on the result of a behavior. So if an IF has nothing to do with intention. If an amoeba acts in such a such a way so as confer a fitness benefit on a fellow amoeba while incurring some fitness cost that amoeba is said to be an artist. Now if I do something I'll twist it towards you but you know that my intentions are otherwise you will rightly not view muse and I'll trust. So in human psychological altruism something quite apart from biological altruism has everything to do with intention. The great question of course is since the mind is an evolved organ which is subject to the laws of natural selection then there must be some kind of connection between biological altruism and

psychological altruism. And so you know evolutionary psychologists of a certain ilk will tell you that our entire emotional repertoire is a sort of like a proximal mechanism which whether consciously or not moves us in the direction of doing the right thing for our fitness which is a sort of a very kind of kind of in my view. Great way of looking over some of my very interesting way of looking at what human emotion means. But of course so there's a very very different dynamic which pertains in natural selection when we're talking about biological outros I'm on the one hand from what from when we sort of enter into the world of mind where other things become very important in particular sort of in the realm of the dynamics of social. One man who became interested in the price equation in a different field was Paul Samuelson who was a great economist here at

MIT and won a Nobel Prize and and in fact sort of tragically when George just before George killed himself he decided that he was going to try to pick himself up. And he was going to leave England and come back to here to Boston and work with Samuelson on different problems having to do with economics because he thought that trying to give sandwiches to homeless people had proved proved a bit of a failure it wasn't really helping anyone. But if you could figure out some important mathematical formulas having to do with sort of growth and welfare that that might be more helpful to humanity. So there's one of the last letters is a letter that he writes to Samuelson saying you know I'd like to I'd like to start working with you again. And Samuelson was sort of interested because he he looked at the price equation he was interested by it but nothing nothing came of these things. His great. I mean in the end price price really was was desperate

for some kind of great discovery in his lifetime and in the end the discovery that he made or the contribution that he made had to do with without was an evolution of altruism.