The Price of Altruism (31 page)

His search for a miracle, it was patently clear, had ended in glorious failure. His mother was dead. Julia hated him. Edison and he had long drifted apart, but so now were his quickly maturing daughters, living out in California and starting families of their own. He was alone in a foreign country and had no friends. His arm and shoulder were partly paralyzed. His forays into human evolution were incomplete, dependent on a selection mathematics that had been humiliatingly rejected, twice. Swinging London was as much at odds with his grim lifestyle as the search for the origins of family was with his tattered personal affairs. His equation might say otherwise, but if there was any goodness in this world, George Price hadn’t found it.

Excerpts from George Price’s seminal paper in
Nature

M
unich never materialized, but in May a turn arrived as unexpected as it was welcome. “I am enchanted with your formula,” the usually lugubrious Hamilton had written in a hurried script, barely able to contain his excitement. “I really have a clearer picture of the selection process as a result. In its general form I can see how we might use your formula to investigate “‘group selection.’”
¹

It was quite an about face for a man who had judged group selection as so “wooly” an abstraction that it could be safely omitted from the tool kit of the evolutionist. Altruistic behavior was disadvantageous within groups; to evolve it would require groups fighting
among
each other. Kin selection, therefore, could not be an alternative to group selection: Both existed in nature’s plan and needed to be related to each other. Accordingly Hamilton had taken George up on spite, and, in the process, devised a foolproof stratagem. It was a piece of trickery that made him especially proud: He would send his article on spite to
Nature
, wait for its acceptance, and then write to its editor, Maddox, to say that he would have to withdraw since it was entirely based on the covariance math of George Price, whose paper—in case Maddox forgot—had been rejected by him in February. Hamilton would, of course, be happy for “Selfishness and Spiteful Behaviour in an Evolutionary Model” to appear in
Nature
but not until the status of Dr. Price’s article was finally resolved. A masterstroke of subterfuge, a coup of cunning and guile, amazingly, it worked. George’s letter to the editor,
Nature
soon replied, would be published as an article, “Selection and Covariance.”
²

Walking home that day from UCL, as usual, George eyed the All Souls spire jutting up above the buildings. It was constructed of seventeen concave sides encircled by twelve Corinthian columns, the capitals Ionic in design, made from Coade stone, and the winged heads of the cherubs based on a design by Michelangelo. Three large clocks beneath the columns counted the minutes and hours with black and golden Hermle spade hands. The spire was a perfect cone, as sharp as it seemed foreboding, fearless in the way it pierced the overcast sky. As he turned from narrow Riding House Street into Little Titchfield, George began wondering about his luck, and, in particular, about coincidences.

Later he would write that the “coincidences” that forced him to convert were on the order of 1/1030, odds so fleetingly miniscule that he simply had no choice but to “give in and admit that God existed.”
³
“About the beginning of June,” he wrote to his brother, Edison, in the fall, trying to explain,

What had been the initial “surprising coincidence”? It was bizarre and absurd, maniacal and eerie. But it had George entirely transfixed.

Back at Christmas, Bob and Margarite Sheffield, old Price family friends from New York City, had been visiting London with their two daughters, Anne and Sally. Almost immediately, though she was barely eighteen, George took a liking to Anne. Bob wasn’t particularly happy about it, and hinted to George to back off. But Anne was continuing with a friend on a trip through Europe, and after visiting Finland, Sweden, and Germany, wrote to George innocently that she was scheduled to return to London on May 15, this time alone. “Since your visit played a critical role in this,” he wrote to her later, explaining his conversion, “I know that you will be interested in hearing how this came about. Prepare yourself to hear some surprising things, for there are more things in heaven and earth than you, I presume, imagine.”
⁵

This is how it happened: When George first saw Anne over Christmas, he noticed her uncanny similarities to another Anne, the old girlfriend from the Midwest who had come to New York to see him just before his meeting with Emanuel Piore, director of research, on the twenty-third floor of the IBM Building in New York, on July 16, 1957. It was at that fateful meeting that George turned down Piore’s offer to join IBM as a senior researcher, based on the draft of his Design Machine published a few months earlier in
Fortune
magazine. And it had been on the previous day, the fifteenth, that he met Anne and instead of offering to marry her, told her he’d think about things. When
he
had wanted to marry her around the time he had contracted polio, Anne had broken off their relationship for another man. Now, still jealous, he figured he could take his time.

Clearly, he came to believe, this had led to his downfall. For had he asked Anne, who was a Roman Catholic, to marry him that day, he would have been focused first and foremost on nailing down a stable job. And had he accepted Piore’s offer, he would never have found himself in the drug-infested predicament in the Village, selling himself short on technical manuals for GE and Sperry-Marine, and trying and failing to write
No Easy Way
. In fact, had he taken Piore’s offer, he would never have joined IBM on a lower rung, and might never have contracted thyroid cancer. If he hadn’t been sick, he’d never have come under “butcher” Ferguson’s knife, and his life might not have descended into misery.
⁶

July 15, 1957, had been a fateful day, all right, of this he was certain. And so, meeting Anne Sheffield now, thirteen years later, couldn’t just be a “coincidence.” She not only looked just like the earlier Anne, she had the very same name, the very same inflections. It didn’t seem to matter that he was forty-seven and she was eighteen and the daughter of close family friends. He wanted her, he wrote to her, “so very very much.” On everything important to him—choosing to become a chemist, choosing to marry Julia, choosing to go to Ferguson, choosing not to marry the first Anne—he had always taken the wrong path. This time he was determined not to make another mistake.
⁷

Innocent and spooked, Anne left London for home at the end of the week. Convinced that there must be more than just the hand of chance involved, alone again and lovestruck, George remembered a poem by Henry Constable that an old Harvard friend had once sent him. “To live in Hell, and Heaven to behold / To welcome life, and die a living death /…If this be love, if love in this be grounded…” He couldn’t quite remember the rest, and started searching for the poem in his papers. When he couldn’t find it, he ran over to the British Museum Library. Fingering through the index cards, he came upon another Henry Constable, not the sixteenth century poet but a twentieth century theologian and believer in conditional immortality whose titles—
Hades: or the Intermediate State of Man
;
Restitution of All Things
;
The Duration and the Nature of Future Punishment
—sent shivers down his spine. Once again—an identical name and a message!
⁸

Walking back to his flat on Little Titchfield beneath the spire, George contemplated his phone number. It was 580-2399, the last four digits signaling a minute before midnight. Of course 2359 was technically correct, but to him 2399 was meaningful, and that’s what really mattered. Was this another message? Could someone be signaling to him that the clock of doom was about to strike, that only a moment remained to make the right choice in life, finally,
once and for all
?
⁹

As he looked through his diaries and letters, he saw more and more “coincidences.” Names, numbers, dates—they aligned in such ways that a pattern couldn’t honestly be ruled out. Someone was speaking to him, of this he was sure. “It wasn’t that I wanted to believe,” he later wrote to Anne, “but there wasn’t any alternative.” Finally, forty-seven years old and a lifelong fanatical atheist, he gave in and bowed to the spire. On June 14, George Price walked out of his flat up the stairs and through the warm, honey-colored circular portico of All Souls Church.

All Souls had been designed by John Nash, the favorite architect of King George IV, formerly the Prince Regent, and was consecrated by William Howell, the bishop of London, in 1824. A cartoon from those days depicting Nash impaled on its spire and referring to All Souls as “an extinguisher on a flat candlestick,” made clear that the peculiar combination of Gothic spire and classical rotunda was not at first universally admired. But criticism soon died down. Since 1870, a history of the church explained, “All Souls seems to have been simple in worship and vigorous in missionary effort. Apart from two short periods it has always been evangelical in tradition.”
¹⁰

By “coincidence” again, George happened to walk in on the one Sunday of the month when services were intended for guests and novices rather than regular parishioners. With a program in hand (they weren’t distributed on other Sundays), he took his seat on a spare wooden pew in the west gallery. In the handsome Spanish mahogany chancel above him, designed by Nash, the organ sang from newly gilded nonspeaking pipes restored after damage incurred in the war. It was a spacious hall, bright and airy. Behind the podium a large Richard Westall
Ecce Homo
painting of Christ in the hands of his enemies dominated. Reading the words above it, etched in gold in a half circle, George felt as though the whole service might have been planned especially for him: “God So Loved the World He Sacrificed His Only Begotten Son.”

The next day, when he came to inquire about joining the Church of England, he was surprised to find that he had been baptized as an Episcopalian, which meant that he was effectively already a member. Since neither of his parents had had anything to do with Episcopalianism, and since it saved him a whole lot of hassle, this too seemed like another “coincidence.” Going through his records later at home, a £120 covenant for the year in hand, he remembered that while living in Minneapolis, to assuage Julia, he had joined a Unitarian church whose minister was an agnostic and most of the congregation atheists. Now he really knew that nothing had happened by chance, that things had long ago been determined: The date, another “coincidence,” had been June 14, 1955—fifteen years to the day before his first visit to All Souls.
¹¹

It was statistical evidence that had forced him to become a Christian, but now that it had happened new meanings soon arose. He had bought a secondhand Revised New Testament that Tuesday, and on Saturday came to listen to a sermon on “Christ on the Mount of Olives.” He began reading his Bible furiously, making notes to himself. In his appointment diary “Scripture Center” and “Buy Book of Common Prayer” appeared side by side with “need guidance” and “Dr. Hawes—thyroid.” In particular, he had begun intense conversations with John Stott, next to whose name in the diary appear the words, “Ask! Ask! Ask!”
¹²
The son of an agnostic Harley Street physician, Stott as a boy at Rugby in 1938 heard a sermon, “What Then Shall I Do with Jesus, Who Is Called the Christ?” and never looked back. With a double First in French and Theology from Cambridge he was appointed curate at All Souls in 1945 and rector in 1950, and quickly rose to become the leader of the Evangelical Church in England.
¹³

George proved an opinionated novice. He was looking for hints in the Bible, a code. Stott told him to take things more slowly, to be less of a literalist.
¹⁴
George claimed that it was crucial to discover precisely what God wanted of man, and had opinions about Church misinterpretations. Conversations with Stott soon became acrimonious. More than anything now, George was concerned with the question of determinism: How much of fate was up to chance and free will, and how much had already been fixed firmly from above?

It was July 1970, a particularly warm summer. Earlier the previous year, short on cash, George had written to the old Harvard buddy who had sent him the Constable poem, Henry Noel, asking that he return half of a $62.70 shipping bill for furniture he had left in Henry’s New York apartment when he was leaving for England in 1967. Henry had been a handsome, idealistic son of East Andover, New Hampshire, who left Harvard in 1942 to join the American Field Service in India and Italy, winning the Burma Star and Italian Theater Ribbon. But returning to the United States after the war and according to his own account, “heedlessly diving into the welter of contemporary American bourgeois decadence,” he soon had a change of heart. Embarking as a purser on a Los Angeles Tanker Company ship, he sailed to France and voluntarily renounced his U.S. citizenship. “Harvard Alumnus Renounces U.S.,” the
Boston Traveler
’s shocking headline ran, as did almost every newspaper in America from the
Plainfield Courier-News
to the
Dallas Times-Herald
. But Henry had already chosen his path: He was to be a “citizen of the world,” never a national, and moved down to Kassel, Germany, to work as a bricklayer and “familiarize myself with the country and the people.”
¹⁵

Back in America now, having taken up residence as an alien immigrant admitted on the French immigration quota, Henry Noel was married with two children, a freelance editor of school textbooks working on the side on a book on UFOs as well as an autobiography. “I must say that I never thought of you as a likely convert,” he wrote after hearing George’s news.
¹⁶
He was delighted. He, too, had had a conversion some years before. In fact, besides himself, George was the only person “in all history, literature, and personal acquaintance” of whom Henry had ever heard who was drawn to Jesus by “the apparent inoperativeness of the laws of probability.” His own experience in 1963 had involved the turning of the clock/thermometer on the Union Square Savings Bank: