The Economist on Selflessness

Selflessness of strangers

The search for an evolutionary theory

May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness. By Oren Harman. W.W. Norton; 464 pages; $27.95. The Bodley Head; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

WHEN George Price died in January 1975, his funeral in London was attended by five homeless men: dishevelled, smelly and cold. Alongside them were Bill Hamilton and John Maynard Smith, both distinguished British evolutionary biologists. All seven men had come to mourn an American scientist who helped to unpick the riddle of why people should ever be kind to one another, who had chosen to give away his clothes, his possessions and his home, and who, when his generosity was exhausted, slashed his own throat with a pair of scissors, aged 52.

Ever since Charles Darwin had published his theory of evolution in 1859, scientists have pondered whether it can explain the existence of altruism: behaviour that decreases an individual’s fitness but which increases the average fitness of the group to which he belongs. Such benevolence is not unique to humans but exists also in complex insect societies. Bees, for example, live in colonies headed by a queen and populated by sterile workers. One reading of Darwin’s theory says that, because the workers do not breed, evolution should result in their elimination. Yet this is not what happens in nature.

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In the 1960s, Hamilton proposed that evolution acts on characteristics that favour the survival of close relatives of a certain individual. The bee colonies that survive are those in which sterile workers (which are daughters of the queen) provide the “fittest” service to their mother. Each worker thus strives to favour the reproductive success of the queen, even at the price of her own reproductive failure.

Price wanted to describe mathematically how a genetic predisposition to altruism could evolve. He devised a formula, now called the Price equation, that describes how characteristics that can, in some cases, prove disadvantageous, nevertheless persist in the population. By tinkering with the variables, he was able to describe populations in which kindness was widespread, everyone benefited and altruism was passed down the generations, and other, more brutal worlds, where charity was abused and kindness died out.

Ultimately, Price ended up in such a place. Oren Harman’s account of his life traces his early years, including a stint at the University of Chicago, where he worked on detecting radiation as his colleagues toiled to produce the first atomic pile. It bounces between his many interests: Price trained as a chemist but worked on electronic transistors at Bell Labs before going into computer-aided design. Then a generous payment from his health insurance for a thyroid tumour enabled him to abandon his wife and two young daughters and move to London in 1967.

There he hooked up with Hamilton and derived the equation for which he is famed. At the same time, his interest in altruism blossomed into something less kin-based and more practical: he began to seek out needy strangers. At one stage, he had four homeless men staying in his flat, while he slept in his office. As he became increasingly unwell, both physically and mentally, he redoubled his efforts to help the poor, moving into a dirty squat where, one freezing night, he committed suicide. As Mr Harman so vividly describes, Price ultimately became one of the vagabonds he had set out to save.