The Price of Altruism Read online

  It wasn’t all that surprising, then, after the Dragon School and Eton, that JBS enlisted at Oxford, just down Banbury Road. Nor, as the story goes, that he went into the wrong entrance-examination door by mistake, gaining a scholarship in maths instead of classics. In the end he would graduate from New College with a First in both and be offered a fellowship in physiology; all depended on returning in one piece from the war.

  Which would not be easy. His men in the elite Scottish Black Watch Brigade, known for its fierceness and tartan kilts, dubbed the obviously somewhat touched lieutenant in charge of grenades and mortars the “Rajah of Bomb.” Self-initiated solo raids into no-man’s land, a makeshift bomb workshop, and the time he drove a bicycle across a gap in front of the unbelieving eyes of the Germans (having calculated that the enemy’s incredulity would assure his safety), all made plain what “Bombo” Haldane himself admitted: He was having a ball in war.16

  And so when he clambered into the Prince of Wales’s car after having been blasted at Aubers it would not be the last time he was wounded. JBS was cocksure, and entitled. His zeal for battle was so great that he was once pushed midaction into a ditch by his own gunners, unenthused about the retaliatory fire his immanent mortar would draw to their battery. Still, his men respected him, revered him, even. With his imposing frame, premature balding head, massive forehead and Celtic-warrior-like mustache, he looked like an “alert walrus” in a skirt. It was alternately comical and bloodcurdling. 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 smoking compulsory in his bomb-making workshop (he was selecting out the fainthearted)? 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 father’s at a makeshift lab in Saint-Omer, the quicker to meet the challenge of German gas attacks on Allied forces in Belgium?17

  Haldane’s men had heard many Oxford stories. How, in 1913, blacklegs had been hired by the municipality to replace the striking horse-tram drivers. With their services provided, the drivers’ demands went unmet, and successive attempts to unharness the stand-in horses were defeated by baton-wielding bobbies. Until JBS came along, that is. Marching up and down Cornmarket Street, solo, in solidarity with the workers, chanting the Athanasian Creed and the Latin psalm Eructavit cor meum, Jack drew a crowd, blocking 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 snook cocked at authority and an Oxonian irony: with this piece of street theatre, JBS established his modus operandi.”18 The university fined him two guineas. It was “the first case for over three centuries,” Haldane boasted, “when a man was punished in Oxford for publicly professing the principles of the Church of England.”

  Often dismissive and always demanding, Jack nevertheless had a soft spot for the underdog, and his men and commanding officers could feel it.19 He was also fiercely loyal: He was wounded twice trying to get back to his brigade from Saint-Omer after he and Uffer gassed themselves silly with chlorine. Haldane’s prodigious talents and his love for genetics and the everyman would in due course propel him to fame. In the meantime he was back in action on the Mesopotamian front, and injured again in a valiant attempt to gain control over a fire in a bomb depot at the end of 1916. Presently he was lying bandaged in a military hospital. If a war hero had to be selected for increased procreation, J. B. S. Haldane would have won out over anyone.

  We can no more accept the principle of arbitrary and casual variation and natural selection as a sufficient account, per se, of the past and present organic world, than we can receive the Laputan method of composing books (pushed á l’outrance) as a sufficient one of Shakespeare and the Principia.20

  That was England’s leading astronomer and natural philosopher, John Herschel, reviewing the Origin in 1861. If variation was due to chance, and evolution depended on variation, then Darwin’s entire edifice rested on shockingly haphazard foundations. Herschel called it “the law of higgledy piggledy,” and many nodded with approval. After all, were men really to believe that all the vaunted glories of nature were created in the preposterous manner of imaginary dwarves toiling blindly over Romeo and Juliet and Newton?

  Fisher was now the chief statistician at the Agricultural Research Station at Rothamsted. Already his Statistical Methods for Research Workers fashioned him the modern inheritor of Gauss and Laplace.21 Soon he would be hailed Darwin’s greatest successor, too, the unchallenged master of not one but two disciplines. His nonbloodline pedigree might have played a part: Maj. Leonard Darwin, childless eugenicist and Darwin’s third son, had become his filial mentor, making Fisher Darwin’s spiritual grandson. For nearly a decade now Major Leonard had been prodding him to ground his father’s theory in mathematics. Wary of his wont for folding a plenitude of insights into a grain of words, he warned him: “One idea one sentence is, I think, a good rule.”22

  The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection was finally published in 1930, and while Major Leonard’s warning wasn’t heeded, it immediately became a classic. It had been dictated the previous year in the evenings to Nicolette, a matrimonial duty alongside reading him the Times each morning while he ate an unrushed breakfast. In his dense, frustratingly opaque prose Fisher replied, once again with authorial assurance, to the foible of a long-deceased contrarian. “Yes,” came his retort to Herschel’s rhetorical Swiftian allusion, the Laputans’ method seemed just about right: The very power of natural selection stemmed from the fact that it is “a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability.”23

  Everything hinged on the existence of large populations, low mutation rates, and a sea of single genes. Like a Laputan lunging at a random letter to compose the Principia, a mutation was a “leap in the dark.” But in large populations, where sex would mix things up, mutations could be tested across an enormous range of genetic combinations. Natural selection would guarantee that their presence would almost never invite indifference: Either they made their possessor fitter and were selected, or they reduced fitness and were summarily expelled.

  Working out the partial-differential equations for gene frequency change in a population, Fisher could show the precise probability for the survival of a mutant gene. A mutation that conferred a 1 percent advantage would have close to a 2 percent chance of establishing itself in each generation. If the population was large enough, it would take no time at all for such a mutation to spread to every one of its members. In fact, even minute selective pressures, fractions of a percent, could propel mutations to take over a population: The larger the population, the faster the conquest. Had it not been proven lawful, natural selection might have been mistaken for a miracle: The proxy of divine Creation, it transformed unintended accident into the semblance of deliberate, most wonderful design.

  The centerpiece of the Genetical Theory he called “the fundamental theorem of natural selection”: “The rate of increase in fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time.” A brew of Anglicanism and Nietszche, it encapsulated all that he believed in. But what did these mysterious words actually mean? Like an Icelandic spell or a secret We Free enchantment, they defied simple understanding. No one but Fisher seemed to know.24

  What they appeared to mean was this: The second law of thermodynamics spoke of a world settling constantly into disorder: Heat spreads in a cold room, gas diffuses in an empty flask, matter always strives to become homogenous. Fisher knew this well; he had spent a year studying quantum physics with James Jeans at Cambridge after graduation. From the very start, then, God had set himself the task of combating decay.

  Thankfully he had created natural selection to help him wage his battle. The fundamental theorem was the biological analog to the second law, only climbing in the opposite direction. Far from matter descending into ch
aos, life was persistently ordering itself guided by the greatest of impresarios. His proxy, natural selection, was the proud reply to the winding down of the universe. The more variation in fitness there was to work with, the faster was its progress, the fitter did the population grow. Fisher could hardly have asked for a more perfect foundation for his faith: Two scientific laws described the ups and downs of the universe; but it was his, the fundamental theorem, which held all the promise for mankind.25

  Zarathustra had gotten to him. Already in his 1913 talk to the Eugenics Education Society, Fisher had fathomed the true scope of nature’s miracle:

  From the moment we grasp, firmly and completely, Darwin’s theory of evolution, we begin to realize that we have obtained not merely a description of the past, or an explanation of the present, but a veritable key to the future; and this consideration becomes the more forcibly impressed on us the more thoroughly we apply the doctrine; the more clearly we see that not only the organization and structure of the body, and the cruder physical impulses, but that the whole constitution of our ethical and aesthetic nature, all the refinements of beauty, all the delicacy of our sense of beauty, our moral instincts of obedience and compassion, pity or indignation, our moments of religious awe, or mystical penetration—all have their biological significance, all (from the biological point of view) exist in virtue of their biological significance.26

  Huxley had cautioned man to take a good look at Nature and then run, morally, in the opposite direction. But Nietzsche saw that ethics were threatened by evolution only if nature was considered improper. What Fisher was showing was that there were no grounds for such dirty thoughts. On a visit to the London Zoo in 1838, Darwin had scribbled in his notebook: “He who understands the baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” Fisher agreed but thought he’d taken it one step further. In his mathematical Mendelian-like appendix to the Origin he had proved what his spiritual grandfather could only imagine: that natural selection had planted and would continue to water the very seeds of human kindness.27

  If only man didn’t get in the way. In the grand evolutionary tale, morality made man fitter, which was precisely why Fisher was growing worried. In his folly man could ruin in generations what Nature had accomplished over eons. The demon was wealth, for the more possessions man held, the fewer incentives he had to procreate. Abundant children, after all, meant a thinner sliver of the pie for each; why toil only to see the hard-earned fruits of your labor waste away in the next generation? In modern times the infanticidal impulse could be replaced by contraception, but it was only the well educated who ever deigned to use a sheath. Since he was certain that the better-quality genes were clustered in the upper strata of society, the multiplying of the dregs was a problem.

  God had met entropy by introducing natural selection, but avarice might frustrate his design. In the long run, Fisher was certain, Nature would utter the final, compassionate word: The more contraception was used the less it would appear in future generations, for those who harbored covetous sentiments would leave fewer of their kind, while those who didn’t would breed the practice out of the population. Ultimately civilization would learn evolution’s lessons and adapt. The question was: Did humanity have the time to linger?28

  More and more it seemed as though it didn’t. Luckily, however, in his benevolence, God offered the dual gift of responsibility and occasion, arming his creatures with the capacity for free will. The fundamental theorem showed that natural selection had done almost all the work for us, inching man closer to his genetic optimum. Still, Fisher told a BBC Radio audience, “in the language of Genesis, we are living in the sixth day, probably rather early in the morning.” God was beckoning to complete his Creation: As sure as animals, men could navigate their destiny; nothing was yet determined or prearranged. If only family allowances were provided to propel the desirable (meaning the upper classes) to procreate, mankind could resume its natural course. Far from an instrument of decay, heredity would be its confederate. In the end, after all was said and done, genetics was its greatest and only hope.29

  Before he could react to the whistle of the bomb, the elderly lady on the bench right beside him had been torn to shreds. Blown to the ground, miraculously unhurt, Haldane could hardly believe his luck. Damn those bloody fascists! He was in a park, in the middle of an air raid, Madrid, the summer of 1936.

  It was only a few days earlier that he fitted his large frame into leather pants and jacket, and, with the ears of his hat flapping in the wind and goggles fastened tight, made his way to Spain on his motorcycle from London. Haldane was now professor of genetics at University College, a fellow of the Royal Society, and, following the recent attempted coup d’état against the government of the Second Spanish Republic, speeding fast in the direction of his convictions. When Uffer had died earlier that March, Jack had been trusted with scattering his ashes over the family lands in Cloan. He would only join the Communist Party officially in 1942, but already on the train to Scotland insisted on traveling with the urn third class. JBS had been stung by Marx.

  Back from the Great War he had been appointed reader in biochemistry at Cambridge where, in 1924, he had given an interview to a journalist named Charlotte Burghes and fallen in love. The old guard at the university weren’t happy about the affair; Charlotte was a married woman, and England’s leading Mendelian, William Bateson, didn’t appreciate Haldane running the streets “like a dog.”30 Still, after he won his appeal against a committee of six senior university members who had sought his dismissal, Charlotte divorced and the Haldanes were married. JBS took pleasure in pronouncing the committee’s Latin name, Sex Viri, with the requisite soft W for a V, and a seventh member was added to escape his ridicule. “We must learn not to take traditional morals too seriously,” he would say, and there was no one who questioned his sincerity.31

  Meanwhile he was wowing the world with his talents, emerging as a top-flight biochemist (identifying cytochrome oxidase in different taxa), geneticist (finding more instances of linkage), physiologist (inventing a method to relieve divers of the bends), enzymologist (deriving the Briggs-Haldane equation), popular science writer (writing Daedalus and Callinicus), and intrepid self-experimenter (drinking ammonium chloride—more than had killed a dog—to prove that breathing is controlled by carbon dioxide). Even by Oxbridge standards he was a character extraordinaire. Alongside these achievements, as the following note to his secretary shows, he’d begun searching for his ideological home:

  Wanted:

  1) Insignia of the Order of the Holy Cross

  2) Mr Ford’s bank balance

  3) Clara Bow

  4) Info on all trains bet. 11 A.M.–5 P.M. from London-Paris

  5) £5 (cheque cashed)

  6) safety razor blades

  7) If you can manage, a max of botches

  8) Karl Mark’s Kapital32

  Fascism was ascendant in Europe, economic depression everywhere. With Britain failing miserably either to show political resolve or to stage a recovery, disaffected liberals had fallen into lethargy and ennui. The barren, self-pitying “spiritual muddle” drove Haldane, and an entire “social relations of science movement,” to rage. It was morally bankrupt and even worse, scientifically illiterate. After all, “the progress of society depends…on the progressive application of science,” but England still cuddled “essay-writers” instead of scientists.33

  Not so in Russia. There, only the ballerina could compete with the scientist for cachet. Haldane, like many other left-leaning Western scientists, was completely enamored. In 1928 he and Charlotte had visited Russia on the invitation of the famously handsome and fearless plant geneticist Nikolai Vavilov. Lavished with a gala dinner and carted around to busy institutes, JBS took little notice of the shabby apartments and empty canteens. Even as they stood in the long line waiting for their exit visas he pontificated to Charlotte about how impressed he was by the Soviets. Russia was where the future lay because in Russia science had been endowed wit
h the authority of religion. “Our present rulers and those who support them,” he pronounced upon return, “will be well advised explicitly to imitate the extremely capable Bolshevik leaders, and adopt an experimental method.”34

  Marxism could combat fascism where liberal democracy had failed. It divined the winning attitude for using science and technology to save civilization. It honored the everyman and gave respect to the underdog. But Marxism provided something even more fundamental: the tools to grasp reality, to see the world the way it is rather than how people want it to be. Before his conversion Haldane joked that his favorite Marx was Groucho, but he was quickly coming into the fold. Whether this was lip service or the real thing, he’d been using the method of dialectical materialism to get a grip on evolution. Or so at least he claimed.35

  The Causes of Evolution, published in 1932, was the popular exposition of nine pathbreaking technical papers (with a tenth still on its way) detailing “A Mathematical Theory of Natural and Artificial Selection.”36 Haldane’s equations were not pretty, he was a “plodding algebraist,” not, like Fisher, a “mathematician’s mathematician.”37 And yet, just like Fisher, he spoke to Mendelians and biometricians both, showing convincingly how natural selection, operating on genes in a population slowly and gradually could account for dramatic evolutionary change. More like a greasy-hands repairman/engineer than a pristine apostle of Nietszche, he felt no need to posit a fundamental theorem. To Haldane evolution was a process, not an edict.