The Price of Altruism (52 page)
Read The Price of Altruism Online
Authors: Oren Harman
The Halbans—Martine, Peter, Alexander, and Tania—were loving and fun hosts, always, on my frequent visits to London. Marty Peretz has for years been a special friend—generous, caring, and huggably irreverent—and via his introduction of me to Leon Wieseltier, acted as something of a godfather to the project, which began in miniature as a
New Republic
essay. Samantha Power not only encouraged me to write, among hippos on the Zambezi River, but also introduced me to her magnificent agent, Sarah Chalfant, who became my friend and without whom none of this would have happened. Thank you, Sam, and thank you, Sarah. I also am grateful to my old friends Elizabeth Rubin, Maya Topf, and Ghil’ad Zuckermann for early and sustained conversations about what this book was going to be about, and to my lifelong special New York families, Sam and Joann Silverstein and Hugh and Marilyn Nissenson, for always being in my heart. I am saddened that Erich Segal, whom I continue to love dearly along with Karen, Miranda, and Chessy, passed away before the book was published and long before he should have gone. Erich was blessed with a contagious lust for life, and a lovably mischievous twinkle. I always smile when I think of him.
Sue Llewellyn performed a masterful job copyediting, and I am extremely grateful for her hawk eyes and erudition, as well as for Don Rifkin’s expert hand. In England, Kay Peddle at Random House was a fantastically perceptive editor and a friendly voice of encouragement. Thanks to Oren Dai, consummate professional photographer, ptitim-maker, and friend. My editor, Jack Repcheck, a wonderful writer in his own right, has been a constant source of wisdom and good cheer, and has also become a friend. Thank you, Jack—I couldn’t have done it without you, and I look forward to many more years of work together at Norton.
Back home, the Organism continues to be a lifeline. Jeno ax yakar, my partner in crime: you are my source of sanity and insanity, shetavo alexa habraxa! My second family: the one and only Trulner Hakalil—shaderrrr; Nitzan Hakoks who did the unthinkable; Il Xamdelilah my animated chummus partner; Kata Ha’anak—friend, poet, intellectual; Fecht, the arak lover; Horror, Ace, Flotsenkranz, Salta and Shamna, and Ben Jaino (“aval lama bana’al?”)—I love you all like brothers. To my smiling Taltal, thank you for your sweetness, for Purim, and for everything else. Abba and Imma: Thank you so much in everything, for everything, above everything—my most adorable, telephone enthusiast, deeply loving parents. Finally, to my sister, Danz, and brother, Mish, to whom this book is dedicated: You are the two most special, giving, and in a deep sense selfless people I know, and I love you very very much.
PROLOGUE
1.
When Bill Hamilton wrote about the event twenty years after it happened, his memory played tricks on him. See
Narrow Roads of Gene Land
(Oxford: W. H. Freeman/Spektrum: 1996), 325; Saint Pancras Cemetery Registrar files, January 22, 1975; “Weather Report,”
Daily Telegraph
, January 22, 1975.
2.
I thank Ursula Mittwoch for her memories of the funeral, and Martin Collier of the Camden Register Office for invaluable information.
3.
The story about Saint Paul was recounted by John Maynard Smith to Ullica Segerstrle,
Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 68.
4.
Genesis 3:5; 4:9.
5.
Charles Darwin,
Notebook M
, 1838.
6.
Jack Repcheck,
The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth’s Antiquity
(Perseus, 2003), 6; Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species
, 1st and 2nd eds. (London: John Murray, 1859).
7.
For a description of the few partial accounts of George Price’s life and science, see the acknowledgments.
CHAPTER 1: WAR OR PEACE?
1.
Peter Kropotkin,
Memoirs of a Revolutionist
(London: Folio Society, 1978), 232.
2.
Ibid., 232, 234.
3.
Adrian Desmond,
Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), 9, 11; Leonard Huxley, ed.,
Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley
, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1900); Julian Huxley, ed.,
T. H. Huxley’s Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1935).
4.
Kellow Chesney,
The Victorian Underworld
(London: Temple Smith, 1970); Thomas Henry Huxley, “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society: A Programme,”
Nineteenth Century
23 (February 1888), 161–80, reprinted in T. H. Huxley,
Collected Essays
(London: Macmillan, 1883–84), 195–236, quote on 217; Desmond,
Huxley
, 11, 84.
5.
Desmond,
Huxley
, 443–44.
6.
Ibid., 361.
7.
Kropotkin,
Memoirs
, 10, 238, 239.
8.
Ibid., 237–40.
9.
Quoted in Desmond,
Huxley
, xv. On the reception of Darwinism in England see Peter Bowler,
Evolution: The History of an Idea
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 187–245.
10.
The “X Club” was a dining club convened by Huxley and eight other like-minded supporters of Darwin’s theory of evolution and academic liberalism. It met regularly once a month between 1864 and 1893, and wielded a powerful influence over British science. See Roy M. MacLeod, “The X-Club: a Social Network of Science in Late-Victorian England,”
Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London
24, no. 2 (April 1970): 305–22.
11.
Ibid. 424–25; V. Kovalevskii, “On the Osteology of the Hyopotamidae,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
163 (1873), 19–94. See also Desmond Adrian,
The Politics of Evolution
:
Morphology, Medicine and Reform in Radical London
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
12.
Besides Kropotkin’s own
Memoirs
see George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovich,
The Anarchist Prince: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin
(London: T.V. Boardman and Co., 1950), and the more scholarly Martin A. Miller,
Kropotkin
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
13.
Colin Ward, Introduction to
Memoirs of a Revolutionist
, by Peter Kropotkin (London: Folio Society, 1978), 8.
14.
Kropotkin,
Memoirs
, 56; Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev,
Mumu
(Moscow: Detgiz, 1959).
15.
This was the title of an influential treatise by Chernyshevsky, and later of others by Tolstoy and Lenin.
16.
Kropotkin,
Memoirs
, 35.
17.
Ibid., 111, 80, 126.
18.
Charles Darwin,
The Voyage of the Beagle
(Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1997).
19.
E. Paley, ed.,
The Works of William Paley
, 6 vols. (London: Rivington, 1830).
20.
Charles Darwin, Zoological Notes, 1835. Much of Darwin’s written corpus now exists on the Web at http://.darwin-online.org.uk, thanks to the labors of John van Whye and collaborators at Cambridge University.
21.
Some historians have questioned Darwin’s own claims about Malthus’s influence on him. See in particular Silvan S. Schweber, “The Origin of the
Origin
Revisited,”
Journal of the History of Biology
10 (1977), 229–316. On England’s leading evolutionists’ appreciation of Malthus see Robert M. Young, “Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social Theory,” in Robert M. Young,
Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 23–55.
22.
Charles Darwin,
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 120; Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species
, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6.
23.
Darwin,
Voyage of the Beagle
, 228–29; 471.
24.
Darwin,
The Origin of Species
, 396; letter to J. D. Hooker (January 11, 1844),
The Correspondence of Charles Darwin
, vol. 3 (1844–46), ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 2.
25.
Kropotkin,
Memoirs
, 94
26.
Ibid.
27.
Ibid., 157.
28.
Ibid., 201, 202. The best book on Russian anarchism is Paul Avrich,
The Russian Anarchists
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).
29.
Helena Cronin,
The Ant and the Peacock
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
30.
The Origin of Species
, 197.
31.
A pre-
Origin
phrase coined by Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
In Memoriam A. H. H.
(1850).
32.
Thomas Dickson has recently argued that “altruism,” a term coined by the French positivist sociologist Auguste Comte in the early 1850s, filtered through Victorian culture in interesting ways. Contra most previous interpretations he claims that Darwin saw sympathy and love, not only selfishness and competition, throughout the natural world. See Thomas Dickson,
The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain
(Oxford: British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monographs, 2008).
33.
Darwin also spoke of the “family” as a beneficiary, but “community” is the term he used more often.
34.
The Origin of Species
, 196, 392, 164.
35.
Charles Darwin,
The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex
, 1st ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1871), 103.
36.
Kropotkin,
Memoirs
, 254.
37.
Ibid., 258.
38.
Huxley letter to Frederick Dyster, November 25, 1887, quoted in Desmond,
Huxley
, 557; Ronald W. Clark,
The Huxleys
(London: Heinemann, 1968), 109. Huxley’s first child, Noel, had died, aged four, in 1860.
39.
He had won the Royal, the Wollaston, and the Clarke; the Copley, the Linnaean, and the Darwin still awaited him.
40.
Desmond,
Huxley
, 572–73.
41.
Huxley used this term in a lecture invited by the Prince of Wales at Mansion House, January 12, 1887;
The Times
, March 18, 1888;
Nature
37 (1888), 337–38.
42.
On social Darwinism see Richard Hofstadter,
Social Darwinism in American Thought
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); Mike Hawkins,
Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Peter Dickens,
Social Darwinism: Linking Evolutionary Thought to Social Theory
(Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2000); Paul Crook,
Darwin’s Coat-Tails: Essays on Social Darwinism
(Peter Lang, 2007).
43.
Herbert Spencer, “Progress: Its Law and Causes,”
Westminster Review
67 (April 1857).
44.
Desmond,
Huxley
, 184. On Spencer see James G. Kennedy,
Herbert Spencer
(Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1978); Jonathan H. Turner,
Herbert Spencer: A Renewed Appreciation
(Sage Publications, Inc., 1985); Michael W. Taylor,
Men versus the State: Herbert Spencer and Late Victorian Individualism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); James Elwick, “Herbert Spencer and the Disunity of the Social Organism,”
History of Science
41 (2003), 35–72; and Mark Francis,
Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life
(Newcastle: Acumen Publishing, 2007).
45.
Coined in Spencer’s
Principles of Biology
(London: Williams and Norgate, 1864).
46.
Henry George,
Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions, and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth—The Remedy
(London: Kegan Paul, 1885).
47.
Wallace even wrote a textbook titled
Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection with Some of Its Applications
, 2nd ed. (1889; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1975).