The Price of Altruism Read online

  The next day he settled into a large camel-colored sofa in a plush office on the twenty-third floor of the IBM Building. It was still premature for the corporation to start developing the Design Machine, Piore told him, smiling. But if he was interested, George and his imaginative ideas would be welcome at Research and Development. This was quite an offer to a subcontracting technical reviewer, and from the director of research, no less. But unknown to Piore, George had already contacted a fancy lawyer from midtown to inquire about a patent. If Piore was not interested in developing his machine, George wasn’t going to bite. After all, if he joined IBM he wouldn’t be able to work on a private patent, and millions of dollars were at stake. They parted with a friendly handshake. George had to run to make his vacation flight to Puerto Rico—his first trip ever outside America.27

  The following week George went down to the train station to pick up his girls, who were living now with their mother in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Julia was a frustrated woman who “never saw the beauty around her.” She considered her marriage to George “unlucky” after all, she’d been a med-school prospect, and worked on the Manhattan Project—now she was a third-grade teacher. These days, when their mother’s dull schoolteacher friends came over for coffee and cookies, she demanded good manners and hushed voices of her daughters, and, under no circumstances, any talk of Daddy. When Annamarie and Kathleen refused to go to church she gave them her untempered piece of mind. There were rants about Daddy leaving because “they were so awful.” Worst of all, there were Aunt Edith’s hideous boiled dinners, followed by dreaded stewed prunes. Life was not exciting.28

  New York was a far cry from Ypsilanti. Quirky and fun and just the opposite of in-lockstep, George was showing the girls the big world. Carefree and boundless, they went for hot dogs and ice creams, climbed the Statue of Liberty, visited Niagara Falls, and listened to Johnnie and Joe’s one-hit wonder, “Over the Mountain, Across the Sea.” And then there was Yul Brynner starring in The King and I on Broadway. When George waved good-bye at the end of the week as the train pulled away from Grand Central, a crying nine-year-old Annamarie and eight-year-old Kathleen couldn’t have known that it would be one of the last times they’d spend a week with their father.

  He was considering proposing to Anne that week, when he received a notice of termination from Stevens. IBM was cutting ties to subcontractors, and he would need to leave his office by Friday. Meanwhile, the Patent, Trade Marks and Copyrights division at the law offices of William R. Lieberman at 551 Fifth Avenue wrote to explain that a patent needed to be applied for before November, when the Fortune piece would turn public domain. Since he didn’t have the money for this or even a prospect that could promise collateral, it began to sink in with George that his patent was slipping away. Frantic, he wrote to Piore, asking to be considered again for the IBM job. But Piore was on a month’s vacation, and his replacement showed no interest in a fired subcontractor technical editor of whom he had never heard. George had made up his mind by this time—he wanted to marry Anne. But he was out of work and in debt, and she was back in the Midwest and drifting. If only he had proposed to her that day before he met Piore: Surely he would have been focused on finding a stable job then, and grabbed the offer handed to him so generously by the director. It was on that fateful day, he would later claim—July 15, 1957—that his downward spiral began.29

  John Maynard Smith (1920–2004)

  William D. Hamilton (1936–2000)

  Solutions

  JBS was in a London hospital bed. Rectal carcinoma, the doctors said. He was back from India to get the very best treatment available, though the “auto-obituary” he taped, sitting draped in a sari, wasn’t a very good sign. Haldane was about to leave this earth, and he knew it. Meanwhile he asked his student John Maynard Smith to go out to the bookshop to get him something to read.1

  It wasn’t easy for Maynard Smith to see his mentor in such a state. He was born in 1920 in Wimple Street, London, and childhood had been a lonely affair. He was eight when his stern and distant ex-military physician father died; an absent mother provided little comfort beyond the winter home in Berkshire and summer home in Exmoor, the means for which her wealthy Edinburgh stockbroker family could afford. Endless hours watching birds in the countryside confirmed both his love for nature and his isolation.

  At Eton, by way of lore, he soon learned that there was one graduate who had attracted the particular hatred of some of his teachers by betraying his class and religion. There was a noxious blend of privilege and prejudice at the school, but to its credit

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  J. B. S. Haldane’s writings were in the library, and seeking them out, John was captivated. Haldane’s blend of atheism and reason, he thought, “never left you wallowing in a sense of misty profundity.” Almost naturally, scientific and political commitments blended: John requested Capital for a school prize he had won, delved into mathematics, and made peace with the absence of God in his life. He would be a “puzzle-solver,” he hoped, and a socialist. Shirking his maternal grandfather’s wish that he join the family’s stockbroker firm, he read engineering at Trinity College, Cambridge, and joined the Communist Party in 1939.2

  After spending the war years making stress calculations for Miles Aircraft near Reading, John was ready for a change. Poor eyesight meant he’d never be able to fly the planes he designed, so he could never really love them either. As for politics, it was either that or science; one’s heart could be in two places, perhaps, but the brain was more demanding. Since theoretical physics seemed too difficult and chemistry a chore, it was to biology and his old love for nature that Maynard Smith now turned. When he discovered in October 1947 that his hero Haldane was professor of genetics at UCL, he applied forthwith. “Dear Comrade,” his letter began,

  My interest is mainly in evolution and genetics. My main existing qualification is that I am a competent mathematician, and in so far as I have shown any ability as an engineer, it has been in expressing physical problems in terms of mathematics. I read Huxley’s “Evolution: the New Synthesis,” and there seemed to be plenty of scope for a mathematical approach to the subject of natural selection, the origin of species, and so on.3

  Whether he was in a good mood that day or genuinely impressed, JBS fired back a letter of acceptance. It proved a smart decision: As an aircraft engineer John had learned to trust models and the necessary simplifications they demanded. After all, if RAF fighter planes could stay in the sky even though dry calculations on land assumed incompressible air (refuted by the pneumatic tires and inflated life jackets), simplifying assumptions could be valuable.4 Of course, JBS had known this ever since he set foot in biology.

  Maynard Smith made his way to the bookshop. Please don’t die, he thought. Not yet.

  He returned from Dillon’s with a big fat book, Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behaviour, by an author with a long name. The son of the headmaster of Leeds Grammar School, who retired to become rector of the picturesque country parish of Kirkland in the Vale of York, Vero Cope Wynne-Edwards had grown up chasing rabbits in the Pennine hills. At Rugby his buddies called him “Wynne” and together, he’d remember, they “collected plants and Lepidoptera, found birds’ nests, hunted for fossils in the local cement pits, ‘fished’ in ponds for aquatic life, made drawings of ‘scratch dials’ on medieval church walls, and ‘excavated’ for pottery in a Roman camp on Watling Street.”5 By the time he arrived as an undergraduate at New College, Oxford, in 1924, his heart was set on zoology. His teachers were giants: E. S. Goodrich for comparative anatomy, Gavin de Beer for experimental embryology, E. B. Ford for genetics, Julian Huxley for general zoology, Charles Elton for ecology. When Huxley left for King’s College, London, in 1925, it was Elton who loomed large in his education. Elton was now systematically trapping voles and wood mice in Bagley Wood near Oxford, trying to figure out their dynamics. Does the size of wild populations of animals fluctuate in a periodic cycle, he wanted to know, and if so, what was the cau
se?6

  Elton saw that size did fluctuate, but he never solved the mystery: Was it due to weather, the food supply, migration, predator-prey oscillations? No one seemed to know. It was just around then that he gave Wynne-Edwards a book to read, The Population Problem. Written in 1922 by a former student of Huxley’s who would go on to become the director of the London School of Economics and be knighted for public service, it made a revolutionary claim. Contrary to Malthus, Alexander Carr-Saunders argued, humans could do without disaster. Neither plagues nor war nor famine nor any form of “natural corrective” was necessary to provide the perfect fit between what the world can feed and the number of hungry mouths. When there was plenty, man procreated generously; when there was dearth, he procreated less. Neither a slave to the elements nor a victim of the earth, he was perfectly attuned to his environment. This much evolution had taught us: The primitive tribes that survived into modernity were exercising population control. And density was always at its optimum.7

  Forty years later, when Wynne-Edwards was writing the book Maynard Smith now brought to the dying Haldane, he suddenly understood. He was a professor at Aberdeen, an Englishman with a Welsh name who had lived half his life in Scotland. Like Kropotkin, he had made expeditions to northern lands, where the harsh elements had driven animals to cooperate.8 If competition existed in nature, the Arctic taught him, it was directed at the environment, and animals had developed a myriad of social mechanisms to cope. Already in 1937, on the Baffin Islands’ coastline, he observed that only between one-third and two-fifths of the fulmars in the breeding colony mated while the rest were pushed into marginal territories and often died.9 What a clever way to prevent overexploitation! Even more ingenious was the chorus of singing accompanying each breeding season: Short of using a calculator, it was the best way for the flock to assess its size and, surveying its resources, reproduce accordingly. Now, in 1962, as he sat down to explain such phenomena after years of thought, he fathomed his debt to Carr-Saunders. Birds, just like primitive man, were regulating their numbers.10

  It was an idea, some thought, that flew smack in the face of Darwinism. Man might exercise birth control, but birds? Surely their brains were no match for the inexorable natural imperative to procreate, the ultimate arbiter of the survival of the strong. In the 1930s Julian Huxley had sent another of his students to the tropics to study Darwin’s old finches. What David Lack saw there was that competition for food was rampant, but that slight differences between geographically isolated groups might reduce it.11 Each group of finches specializing in a particular food in a particular habitat made for a wonderful mechanism to get out of the others’ way; gradually, genetically, the populations became distinct. Nature, in other words, would go to great lengths to avert conflict, even to the end of divining new species. But as powerful as the force of competition, more powerful—since more fundamental—was the instinct to procreate. Individuals were out to maximize their fitness, to sire just as much as they could. The idea of altruistic birds passing up a number for the greater good made absolutely no sense.12

  Unless, of course, natural selection was operating on the group, which was exactly what Wynne-Edwards was arguing. Drawing on Wright’s model of group selection, Wheeler’s superorganism, Emerson’s homeostasis, and Allee’s fowl hierarchies, he made a nonmathematical case for the collective. Individuality was important but subordinate: When the physiology of the singleton came up against the “viability and survival of the stock or race as a whole,” group selection was bound to be the victor and individual reproductive restraint the result. It was just like with fishing: If every fisherman set his net to catch just as many fish as he could, the village folk would quickly find themselves “entering a spiral of diminishing returns.” If, however, an agreement was reached over the maximum catch for each, depletion of the villagers’ maritime food source could be happily avoided.13 As with fishermen and their catch, so with fulmars (and red grouse and many other birds) and their environment: To prevent exhausting limited resources, numbers could be regulated by social convention for the benefit of all.14

  Wynne-Edwards was certain that he was walking in the path of a giant. Darwin had translated Malthus back into nature as he had translated Carr-Saunders. Darwin had used the analogy of artificial selection to explain natural selection as he had used fishing to explain population regulation. But Darwin had also written:

  Whatever the cause may be of each slight difference in the off spring from their parents—and a cause for each must exist—it is the steady accumulation, through natural selection, of such differences, when beneficial to the individual, that gives rise to all the more modifications of structure, by which the innumerable beings on the face of this earth are enabled to struggle with each other, and the best adapted to survive.15

  Now Wynne-Edwards felt, after more than a century, that he’d understood what even the great master had failed to fathom: Adaptations work for the good of populations, not of individuals.

  On his deathbed JBS just chuckled. “Smith, do you know what this book says?” he asked his devoted student, with his usual mischievous air:

  Well, there are these blackcock, you see, and the males are all strutting around, and every so often, a female comes along, and one of them mates with her. And they’ve got this stick, and every time they mate with a female, they cut a little notch in it. And when they’ve cut twelve notches, if another female comes along, they say, “Now, ladies, enough is enough!”16

  When it became clear that the best medicine in the world wouldn’t save him, Haldane returned to India. Clearly he hadn’t been impressed by the biological argument for the greater good, a fact that did not stop him from dying a devoted Marxist on December 1, 1964.

  Maynard Smith was less of a mule than his teacher. The Lysenko affair, the purges, and the invasion of Hungary in the fall of 1956 had been enough for him. Without giving up the sentiment, he gave up the Party, increasingly turning to model evolution and nature. It wasn’t easy: “Why do theory when Haldane is sitting in the room next door?”17 In the beginning he stuck to fly genetics. But gradually, with Haldane’s move to India in 1957, John’s confidence had grown. He was ready to take on evolution on his own.

  John hadn’t read Wynne-Edwards’s book before he brought it to Haldane, but now decided to pay attention. Reviews of the tome had been mixed. Lack, of course, hated it. So did Wynne-Edwards’s beloved teacher Elton who judged it “messianic” and “rather wooly.”18 Many, however, found the notion of a “balance of nature” plausible, and, more importantly, deeply relevant to man. Wynne-Edwards himself egged them along. That summer he had written an article for Scientific American that began: “In population growth the human species is conspicuously out of line with the rest of the animal kingdom.”19 Man was virtually alone in showing a long-term upward trend in numbers. It was a bright red warning sign: However highly he thought of himself, compared to fulmars and red grouse his social skills were retarded. Modern individual freedom, alas, had trampled tribal homeostatic wisdom.

  Just like Darwin, he was trying to bring animals and man closer together; he had shown convincingly, an anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement wrote, that “social life in man…is no unique affair, but the culmination of a very widespread biological phenomenon.”20 The trouble was that they were drifting apart. This much, at least, was clear to the anxious reviewer in The Nation:

  In Wynne-Edwards’ proofs we can see reflected the breakdown of relations between parents and children, the male’s and female’s diminished attachment, the constant migration of peoples, the female’s objection to being just a breeder, the male’s resentment of being just a provider, smaller families, divorces, desertions, minorities escaping from “ghettos,” elites struggling to keep out the invaders, the increase of homosexuality and neuroticism, alcohol and drugs, and above all, the evidence that young people, the group most sensitive to social stress, desire violence, especially if it is unprofitable and senseless: in all this we see
that human society is reacting just as Wynne-Edwards says a crowded society should. It is giving a warning which nobody heeds; even when they see the Sunday cars jamming the highways, as in a dance of gnats, or a swarming of locusts.21

  Maynard Smith took a cool look at the data. Despite the vogue of population-explosion hysteria there was no need to get excited. Theoretically, though, if group selection worked, short of decreasing homosexuality and clearing up traffic jams, it could be an important mechanism in evolution.

  He himself had been contemplating the phenomenon of aging. Why, for heaven’s sake, would evolution select for the degrading of the body: Wouldn’t it be better to be able to reproduce indefinitely? The nineteenth-century giant August Weismann had considered the conundrum and thought the answer lay with the collective: Evolution pushed individuals into old age to make room for the next generation—in the absence of unlimited resources this was surely the best solution for all.22

  But Maynard Smith wasn’t convinced by the logic of the generous-hearted doddering for the good of the replenishing tribe. In the wild, animals hardly ever made it to old age; reproduction declines with survival, not necessarily aging, since the more time lived the greater the chances to die. If natural death rarely occurs in nature, selection couldn’t have produced the trait of aging. Perhaps this was a genetic story, then, rather than one of “group selection”: The very same genes that helped an organism’s fitness when young might with time contribute to aging, having sneaked past the watchful gaze of selection when they were being passed on to the next generation.23