The Price of Altruism Read online

  Isopods are ugly little creatures. Leggy and segmented, they look like a mysterious aquatic blend of scorpion and cricket. Allee was in love. Excited, he determined he’d crack the mystery of the tiny crustacean, abundant in shallow waters, the deep sea, and freshwater streams and ponds.

  Creating artificial currents in the lab, he observed that stream isopods moved toward the current more than pond ones, except when their metabolic rate was low when they were breeding. Since oxygen and carbon dioxide affected metabolic rate, and differed from streams to ponds, it had to be the gases that explained the creatures’ behavior.

  Using depression agents like low oxygen, chloretone, potassium cyanide, low temperature and starvation, he could make stream isopods act like pond ones. Conversely, with high oxygen, caffeine, and elevated temperatures, lazy pond dwellers morphed into energized stream sprinters. Since all the isopods were from the same species, differences in behavior could not be due to heredity. Clearly it was all about interaction with the environment.

  The discovery shook his religious foundations. Hadn’t the Deity instilled behavior in His creations? If so, how could coffee be so powerful? The iron gavel, he now saw, really did fall from a heavenless sky. There was no “hand of God” to behold, only physics and chemistry. Science was winning out over the supernatural.11

  After graduating with a doctorate, Allee was growing uneasy. Married now with a child, he was increasingly disturbed by the war. Why, for heaven’s sake, this horrific bloodshed and carnage? At Chicago science might have laid his childhood belief in an all-powerful God to eternal rest, but at times like this roots provided comfort. If he couldn’t pacify unbelief, he could sure as hell deify pacifism. That March he was appointed chairman of the Quaker War Service for civilian relief in Chicago, an outfit that had grown out of the Monthly Meeting of Friends.

  It was early 1917, and the United States still remained on the sidelines. Already conscientious objectors were being humiliated and beaten in military training camps and prisons. Couldn’t enlistment in the newly formed American Friends Service Committee, aiding relief and reconstruction work abroad, qualify as conscription, a form of noncombatant service during war? After all, liberal pacifism held both the individual and the state responsible for the welfare and rights of the citizen. Conscription to go kill and die in war was in direct violation of this most holy of commitments. Individualism was the bedrock of democracy because it meant the assertion of human freedom, not the vulgar triumph of egoism. The least government could do in times of war was to allow pacifists to provide their service in nonviolent currencies.

  Allee had recently been appointed professor of biology at Lake Forest College. He had read Kropotkin and in his gut knew that he must be right. But he had yet to convince himself of the biological justification for peace and cooperation with an original scientific discovery of his own.

  In the college chapel he preached on the rights of conscientious objectors. When the administration forbade him to preach in the chapel again, he spoke up in the classroom. The college docked his salary. A few faculty and students were heard murmuring the word “traitor” under their breath. Traitor? The local Springfield News-Report wasn’t so inhibited: “Sometimes war is unavoidable, and college professors are no more necessary to civilization than carpenters and cobblers.” Allee’s was a “most convenient theory.” If a choice had to be made, “we should prefer to give up the professors.”12

  In April, Congress voted to enter the Great War. The requests of the American Friends’ Service had been rejected. At Lake Forest, Allee waited for more peaceful times. If he wanted to find scientific proof to combat the folly of human warfare, he would need to go someplace else.

  On the afternoon of December 28, 1917, the delegates shuffled into the Animal Morphology Building at the University of Minnesota blowing into their freezing hands. The newly established National Research Council could easily envision how physicists and mathematicians, chemists and geologists, might lend a hand to the war effort. But what about biologists? At the annual meeting of American Society of Zoologists, a special session on “The Value and Service of Zoological Science” had been hurriedly convened. The delegates settled quietly in their chairs.13

  Darwinism had become about as German as liverwurst. Back in 1859, when he was under attack in England for The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote to a colleague: “The support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.” And although he himself had carefully avoided any political implications for man, in Germany, Darwinism was interpreted as having repercussions for the future of civilization. It was Ludwig Woltmann, a German, who first gave the enterprise its name. Amounting to a revolt against Judeo-Christian and neo-Kantian ethics, “social Darwinism” advanced a set of biologized beliefs: The moral sense is a biological instinct, not a spiritual endowment; human races are unequal; biology is destiny; the welfare of the individual is subservient to the health of the group; the struggle for existence renders war and death necessary to progress; progress and biological purification are one and the same. It was this distortion of Darwin’s theory, many American zoologists claimed, that was blowing wind into Germany’s war sails.14

  No one made this clearer than the Stanford entomologist Vernon Kellogg. Published earlier that year, Headquarters Night was an account of his war experiences as the chief liaison of the Commission for Relief of Belgium to the German high command in France. “The creed of the Allmacht of a natural selection based on violent and fatal competition is the gospel of the German intellectuals,” Kellogg wrote; “all else is illusion and anathema.” Former president Theodore Roosevelt agreed. In the preface to the book, he broadcast: “The man who reads Kellogg’s sketch and yet fails to see why we are at war, and why we must accept no peace save that of overwhelming victory, is neither a good American nor a true lover of mankind.” Formerly a pacifist, Kellogg had now changed his colors. Only a “war to end all wars” could save civilization.15

  The delegates perked their ears in attention. If they could defeat German Darwinism on the scientific battlefield, they’d be lending their shoulders to the war effort. One by one, the big guns were paraded to make the cooperatist case: Did not Herbert Spencer argue that evolution led life from the simple to the complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous? Had he not explained how the ensuing specialization of function necessitates cooperation, the better to bring about an integrated whole? And wasn’t society just like an organism, comprised of individual parts each contributing to the community? Sure, he had later abandoned such ideals to paint a picture of a cutthroat struggle for survival, but he had been more insightful as a young man. And what about Kropotkin, that stellar exemplar of humanity: Had he not defeated Huxley’s “gladiator” in Nature’s glorious arena? Weren’t the fittest, after all, not the fiercest or the strongest but those who acquired the habit of mutual aid and cooperation for the benefit of all?16

  Answering such questions in the affirmative, they suddenly felt like physicists. They left freezing Minneapolis immeasurably more important than when they’d arrived just two days before.

  “How much is sixty million, five hundred and fifty-three thousand, eight hundred and ninety-one divided by twenty-seven?”

  “Two million, five hundred and one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-five point ninety-six.”

  “Good boy!”

  Johnny von Neumann 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 Neumann 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, Zurich, Budapest, Göttingen. Soon the word was out: Von Neumann 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 conte
mplative. 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.”17

  Unsolvable problems were rare, though. Living with his wife, daughter, and an Irish setter, Inverse, at a Princeton mansion on 26 Westcott Road, von Neumann 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 noisier,” his wife said, “the better.” He wore prim, vested suits with a white handkerchief in the pocket, “an outfit just enough out of place to inspire pleasantries.” Von Neumann 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 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 in a frenzy, erasing them before students could get to the end. Klara, his wife, claimed that he wouldn’t remember what he had for lunch, but could recall word for word books he had read twenty years before. He had produced groundbreaking papers in logic, set theory, group theory, ergodic theory, and operator theory. He had described the single-memory architecture of the modern computer, and performed the crucial calculation on the implosion design of the atom bomb. Along side these accomplishments, he loved toys and was observed unaffectedly scrapping 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 demigod who could imitate humans precisely.18

  Above all he was fascinated by games, especially the kind, like poker, based on bluffing and deceit. “It takes a Hungarian to go into a revolving door behind you and come out first,” he used to say. In fact John von Neumann loved games so much that he had decided to study them, seriously, as a mathematician. What he discovered amazed him: In games where two opponents were in absolute conflict, where the loss of one is the gain of the other and only one side can ever win; in such “zero-sum” games there is always an optimal strategy for both players to pursue. Tic-tac-toe is the simplest example, but here is an illustration from life: Imagine two sweet-toothed kids being given a cake and told to share it. When a grown up carefully divides the cake down the middle, one side always feels slighted, even by a crumb. It is best for one of the kids to divide the cake, knowing that the other can choose which piece he wants. Since both kids know that the other wants as big a part of the cake as possible, cutting the cake precisely down the middle is the optimal solution.

  It was mathematically airtight. It applied to games that involved perfect information (both kids know that the cake must be divided), complete self-interest (both kids want as big a piece of the cake as possible), and rational decision making based on a calculation of the other side’s agenda (the kid cutting the cake understands that the other kid wants as big a piece as possible, and vice versa, and both act accordingly). The issue was always how to maximize the minimum the other side strove to leave you with, or, in other words, to minimize maximal losses. The “minimax theorem” proved that there was always a best way to do this. With the relevant information, the right strategy could be known.19

  The economists at Chicago had picked a hard time to wage their battle. In Europe the Great War was now over, but Adolf Hitler had risen to become führer of Germany, and Mussolini ruled with an iron fist in Italy. The Great Depression had taken hold. Reeling citizens looked to their governments for salvation.

  Enter John Maynard Keynes. “I have called this book the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,” he wrote, Cambridge-style, in his magnum opus in 1936,

  placing the emphasis on the prefix general. The object of such a title is to contrast the character of my arguments and conclusions with those of the classical theory of the subject, upon which I was brought up and which dominates the economic thought, both practical and theoretical, of the governing and academic classes of this generation, as it has for a hundred years past. I shall argue that the postulates of the classical theory are applicable to a special case only and not to the general case, the situation which it assumes being a limiting point of the possible positions of equilibrium. Moreover, the characteristics of the special case assumed by the classical theory happen not to be those of the economic society in which we actually live, with the result that its teaching is misleading and disastrous if we attempt to apply it to the facts of experience.20

  If government didn’t intervene in the economy it would be betraying its citizens. Since employment was not determined by the price of labor but by the spending of money (what is called “aggregate demand”), the assumption that competition will deliver full employment in the long run was patently false. On the contrary, underemployment and underinvestment were the likely natural state of competition; unless active measures were taken, that is. Lack of competition, Keynes was arguing, was not the fundamental problem; the reduction of unemployment by cutting wages, no promised panacea. What was needed instead was active government intervention: Public works, deficit spending, redistributive taxation, the lowering of long-term interest rates. In short, if society was to be stable over time, it would need to abandon the Invisible Hand in favor of the welfare state.21

  “Nonsense!” Knight wrote in the margins of his copy of Keynes’s book, alongside more powerful expletives. Nonsense, Chicago colleague and expert on monopolies Aaron Director, a “mordant critic” of governmental and social institutions, concurred. Nonsense, agreed Henry Simons, down the hall, author of A Positive Program for Laissez-Faire. Most combative of all was Jacob Viner, “a strutting Talmudic Napoleon with facial expression alternating at express-train speed between joviality, challenge and utter contempt.”22 Challenging Keynes, Viner took welfare economics to the ring. Markets had to be left free, competition unencumbered. “Survival of the fittest” was the name of the game, intervention a curse of maudlin sensibilities. Man was selfish, but selfishness was not a curse. On the contrary, it was the true and only road to happiness.

  It was said of Viner that his self-appointed task in life was destroying students’ confidence. When in the fall of 1932, a young four-foot-eleven-inch Brooklyn boy, son of immigrant parents from Carpatho-Ruthenia, shuffled into the classroom to attend Economics 301, like everyone else he was trembling. Unlike his fellow students, though, Milton Friedman would one day teach the very same course, becoming the leader of the intellectual movement that would challenge Keynes and the welfare state. Others would argue about precisely when it had all started, but the Chicago School of Economics was on its way.23

  Darwin had pondered over the mystery of sterile insect castes, and so now did a new Chicago recruit. After a decade training at Cornell, teaching in Pittsburgh, and knee crawling in the jungles of British Guiana, Alfred Emerson arrived at the Chicago Biology Department in 1929 with termites on his mind.

  He was the premier expert; when he retired his personal collection consisted of 91 percent of the known species in the world.24 His eyes were exceptionally dark, glistening like plums dipped in cold water. Easygoing and gregarious, he exuded the air of the confident son of a respected scholar of classical archaeology. Still, there was a problem that was killing him. Just like ants, termites were divided into castes, but how did such different castes arise? Were soldier and worker termites genetically determined before hatching, or did some environmental factor, like food, fashion individuals as they developed: for soldiers, ferocious fighting mandibles; for workers, special digestive systems for consuming cellulose. It was difficult to know. After all, at birth all termites are identical.

  Good thing, then, that Sewall Wright was in the room next door. Recruited by Chicago in 1926 for his prodigious mathematical and statistical skills, he had yet to develop the evolutionary model that, alongside Fisher and Hal
dane, would soon make him famous. But he did have a theory about how genes worked: Particular chemical cues activated particular genes in particular ways; they could mutate them or turn them on or off. The genes would then activate particular physiological gradients, depending on the chemical cue they had gotten, directing genetically identical organisms to morph into entirely distinct creatures. That’s how development proceeded: The organism, Wright believed, was a “highly self-regulatory system of reaction” it was a mass of disparate parts each doing its thing to bring about an integrated whole.25

  Emerson liked analogies. Just like organisms, colonies were integrated biological systems. Like genes and chemical cues and physiological gradients, termite warriors and toilers and queens and kings each sang their own particular aria. Whether a newborn termite would develop into a soldier or worker depended on the relative complex of castes in the colony—the analog to Wright’s chemical cues. It was one big coordinated opera. Far from a random aggregation of individuals, a termite colony was in fact a “superorganism,” a system so well integrated that it assumed a life of its own.26

  This had been the idea of a scholar Emerson had met on his knees in the jungles of British Guiana. In fact the Harvard entomologist William Morton Wheeler was so convinced that the colonies of social insects were like a single individual that he saw no difference whatsoever between sterile workers toiling for the nest and a heart pumping for the good of the body. With the help of Wright’s fancy physiological genetics, Emerson could now apply Wheeler’s superorganism to explain termite evolution. Cooperation was a by-product of specialization of function. Ultimately it existed because individuals were subordinate to the whole.27