The Price of Altruism (41 page)

He was still fighting for friends who had fallen on the wrong side of the law: There was Jim Crickett, behind bars at Leeds Prison, whom he was sending pound notes, and, as usual, there was Smoky. On behalf of the latter George wrote a long letter of surety to the official solicitor at the Royal Courts of Justice. “Yes, it is true that since June 25th I have not maintained a fixed abode,” he attempted to justify his own qualifications.

As for Smoky, why, sure, he was trustworthy. In fact he had often helped George with other homeless in the neighborhood. There was no reason to penalize him just because he made the street his home. Was Jesus unworthy of trust, George wondered, since He was a person of no fixed abode?

Often he would help anonymously. “Like an angel coming in,” was how Elisabeth Mansell, the manager of an old people’s home not far from Tolmers, remembered his entrance to SOS House on Christmas Eve, 1973. He had neither phoned nor announced his arrival in any way. But like his unbeckoned entrance to UCL with the equation, he came with special tidings. Elisabeth and George stayed up until well after midnight wrapping presents for the elderly tenants, hoping to surprise them in the morning. When Elisabeth woke up the next day she looked at her watch and panicked: She’d overslept and quickly charged down the stairs. But all was well. There, sitting calmly between the old folk, was George. He’d woken, dressed, and fed all twenty-one residents.
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Then, almost as miraculously as he had arrived, he disappeared.

Amid the chaos of Tolmers and Peg Leg Pete and the alcohol and drugs, George had not forgotten about science. Scribbled notes in an unsteady hand on scrap paper show that he was still working on dense mathematical calculations of genetic polymorphism for Harris.
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Sexual selection, too, was not far from his mind. In fact in mid-February he went up to visit Hamilton at his home in Berkshire for a fortnight. It was a respite, to be sure, from his ragged life in London, but it was first and foremost an opportunity to begin a joint project on sexual selection. Bill and his wife were shocked at his appearance. He looked ill and starving, emaciated. They did their best to convince him to climb back full-time on the boat of genetics; perhaps he could apply for a job to work at Silwood. George said he’d think about. Population genetics wasn’t his main work anymore, didn’t they know?
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Back in town, two weeks later, he wrote to Bill to report on his progress. Things hadn’t been easy. After finally leaving 102 Drummond following a string of violent attacks by Pete, George had slept for two nights at Elisabeth Mansell’s old people’s home. Then there were five merciful nights at a large luxury apartment of a student friend from Galton, with four other flatmates, though he’d caught some awful bug and ended up stretched out on the sofa most of the time. From there he left for a night at a B&B near Earl’s Court, followed by two nights sleeping rough at Victoria Station. On one of these, a drunken down-and-out had attacked him, ripping the watch off his wrist as he fled. He was sorry, but he hadn’t yet had time for sexual selection.
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Still, writing from what he dubbed “Hideaway No. 12,” he had now found more conducive environs:

This past week he’d gone down to the computer room at UCL to run some programs modeling the effects of sexual selection in small populations. He was hopeful that before long the program would be working for medium-size populations and would include polygamous relatedness calculations, too. Bill was on his way to the United States for a few weeks, and implored George to feed himself properly. He, too, hadn’t had much time to work on their project. Meanwhile, he sent a note to Imperial requesting that his collaborator be allowed to use his job number at the University of London Computing Centre. After all, George told him that he was avoiding going around the Galton. Besides, his MRC grant would be running out at the end of next month.
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When he was finally off the payroll beginning May 1, George had exactly £95 in his bank account. He was hopeful that this would get him through his next set of payments to Selfridge’s and Barclays so that he could do his part for their paper before he’d need to take a job. No one at the Galton knew his whereabouts. He had just “crawled out of hiding,” he wrote, to go to Wolfson House to collect mail for the past seven weeks.
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But George had been crawling out of hiding for another purpose, too. Back in October, before he’d moved into 102 Drummond, he’d met a woman outside the Swiss Center. It was raining and he was waiting for Smoky who had promised to come along with him to help some alcoholics. She was waiting for a colleague, too—a woman who ran her charity in Nigeria. Her name was Joan Jenkins, she said, and she’d started the Woman’s Health Concern, focusing on estrogen replacement therapy after menopause. She had trained as a nurse, even worked as a nurse during the war, though for years now her day job was a reporter with the BBC. She was about George’s age, handsome, busty, reddish-sandy-haired; a prim and proper, well-educated, upper-middle-class lady.
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Smoky wasn’t showing up. We’re both stuck here in the rain, George said, Why don’t we go in and have a coffee? At first Joan pitied him: He was terribly unkempt, smelled bad, mumbled all kinds of nonsense about Jesus. But he was also clearly a special person: he knew a lot about hormones, and told her about his own work in genetics. She took him around the BBC to meet her colleagues that day; even took him to her home later to meet her husband, Cyril, and their son. Soon the relationship had turned into a sexual liaison. Every Saturday they’d meet at a set location, usually Finch’s pub close to the Notting Hill Gate tube station, and make their way to the Hotel Commodore at Lancaster Gate, just north of Hyde Park. Joan would pull the grimy clothes off of her gaunt lover, run a hot tub for him, and clean him. Then they would lie down on the fluffed-up bed and make love.
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Joan was beginning to fall for him, and he was trying to hold her back. “Seeking to rush things,” he explained, “you just bring trouble and unhappiness to yourself and others and make me increasingly desirous of avoiding your company.” Jesus was guiding him that he was not yet ready to marry. He was thankful for all her presents: a sweet set of notes left for him at the Angel House hostel, a pair of shoes to replace the sneakers that were long past worn, the meals that she’d buy him. But he didn’t appreciate her growing attempts to straighten him out and organize his life. “With your intelligence why can’t you understand that the way to please me is to leave me alone and especially to give up trying to convert me to your way of doing things.”
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It was not a problem that he was experiencing from Kathleen. Having “dropped out” to live the counterculture life with Dom in Hawaii, George’s daughter thought it was actually pretty cool that he was giving away his possessions. George found it amazing that they’d both started similarly irregular lives at about the same time: staying a lot with friends, smoking dope, living with no thought of the morrow.
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He was frail now, but in his letters tried to sound upbeat and quirky, just the way his daughters liked him:

Once, when George jumped into UCL and was spotted, CABS tried to pin him down to write a short report to the MRC on his polymorphism work. At present George was living in a Tolmers squat with a man who worked nights as a baker. Maybe he too could find a night job that would leave his days free. That way he’d have some time for a little bit of science.

Slowly, something inside him was beginning to stir. He couldn’t quite get a grip on it, but it was growing, he was sure. It started off as a faint impression when his thoughts roamed and his eyes glazed over. Often, when he put his head to rest at night, when the lights went out and his eyelids rolled down, he could almost catch a glimpse of it. Then he could feel it in his stomach, still later, creeping up toward his brain. George had spent the last eighteen months selflessly giving to strangers. But now, perhaps, it was time to take care of himself again.

The reckonings came from all corners. From Great Depression Upper West Side to speculation-decrepit Tolmers Square; what, finally, had life taught him? Skinner, coincidences, the Bible, the Bomb: all had gotten him thinking about the limits of free will. In particular he wondered about the volatility of his own deeds and emotions. Had he been a bad father and a neglectful son because he wanted to or because he’d been “programmed” differently? Had he left his wife and IBM and Little Titchfield due to chance or necessity? How much control did he, and people generally, really have over their own lives?

Since the day he walked down the gangway of the
Queen Elizabeth
back in 1967, evolution had taught him a world of wisdom about kindness. Hamilton’s
r
B > C made altruism dependent on genetic relatedness, whether as its author had first perceived, of the familial kind or, as George had pointed out to him, by simply sharing the trait with strangers in association. The logic of animal conflict, as well as Trivers’s work on reciprocity, made clear that cooperation and mercy would evolve as long as they could be expected in return. A multilevel approach to selection taught that altruism could come about if the group had formidable competitors. And Garrett Hardin’s tragedy of the commons was a warning cry that what was good for the individual was not always good for the community, and that clever ways needed to be imagined if the two were ever to live peacefully hand in hand.

But was science really enough? Could what was dearest to humans simply be the result of some empty evolutionary calculus?

He had found the Lord twice, and was pretty sure the second time that he was following His true calling. But if becoming selfless somehow trumped the logic of genes and reciprocity, then something was amiss. If true, pure giving, neither beholden to propagating more of its kind nor dependent on the promise of being paid back, nor even, as his own equation showed, made possible by groups having to triumph over others, was a heroic slap in the face to everything science had taught him, then obviously he had not cracked any riddle. After all, none of the down-and-outs he had tried to help had changed or would change, and he himself had fallen into a well of misery. He was no longer sure whether pure love and selflessness were possible; maybe, when all was said and done, the circumscribed kindness borne by evolution was really all that there was. If he was going to be honest with himself he would need to look the truth in the face: His attempts to make the world a better place had all utterly failed.

These were his thoughts as he hit rock bottom at the bank and set out to find a job. Luckily Hamilton, too, had not had much time for the work on sexual selection: Up until now all he had done was to collect a few rhinoceros beetles from a rotting log in Pembrokeshire, and most of those hadn’t even mated. In the meantime George found work as a night office cleaner at a local branch of National Westminster Bank. It wasn’t perhaps a dream job, but it would do for now. He liked the silence. It gave him time to think. In any case, he wrote to Bill, he was considered slow but dependable.
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Under conditions of starvation thousands upon thousands of social amoebas of the species
Dictyostelium discoideum
come together to form a tiny fruiting body, a hairlike structure with an orb at its top. The orb is comprised of many fertile spores, while the stalk is made up of amoebas that died after producing strong cellulose walls. It is the self-sacrifice of these amoebas that allows the spores to climb up the stalk where, aided by a strong wind or the legs of an unsuspecting insect, they may be carried away to live to see another day.