The Price of Altruism (63 page)

Authors: Oren Harman

BOOK: The Price of Altruism

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65.
Joseph Rhine letter to George Price, November 22, 1971, GPP; George Price letter to Joseph Rhine, December 19, 1971, GPP.

66.
George R. Price, “Apology to Rhine and Soal,”
Science
175 (1972), 359; Price-Rhine correspondence, January–October, 1972; last quote from letter dated October 19, 1972, GPP.

CHAPTER 11: “LOVE” CONVERSION

1.
Randall E. King, “When Worlds Collide: Politics, Religion, and Media at the 1970 East Tennessee Billy Graham Crusade (Appearance by President Richard M. Nixon),”
Journal of Church and State
39, no. 2 (1997), 273–96; George Price letter to Billy Graham, September 1970; reply from assistant to Billy Graham, September 24, 1970, GPP.

2.
George Price letter to Annamarie and Kathleen, August 2, 1970, GPP; George Price letter to Al Somit, August 13, 1970, GPP; Michael Simpson letter to George Price, July 25, 1970, GPP.

3.
Al Somit letter to George Price, December 2, 1970, GPP; George Price letter to Al Somit, December 12, 1970, GPP.

4.
Al Somit letter to George Price, February 8, GPP.

5.
George Price letter to Al Somit, September 11, 1971, GPP.

6.
Al Somit letter to George Price, October 12, 1971, GPP.

7.
Lorenz shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Niko Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. On Lorenz, his co-Nobelists, and the history of ethology, see Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr.,
Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

8.
Lorenz eventually published his theories on animal fighting in book form in
On Aggression
(London: Methuen, 1966). The assumption of the wide prevalence of nonviolent ritualized combat has since been softened—animals, it seems, escalate conflict more than was previously suspected.

9.
John Maynard Smith, “Equations of Life” in
It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science
, ed. Graham Farmelo (London: Granta, 2003), 161–80, 166; John Maynard Smith, “In Haldane’s Footsteps,” 351. Alongside Lorenz, T. H. Huxley’s grandson Julian Huxley also espoused a group selectionist argument to explain ritualized combat: See J. S. Huxley, “Ritualization of Behaviour in Animals and Man,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
151 (1966), 249–71.

10.
R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa,
Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey
(New York: John Wiley, 1958).

11.
R. C. Lewontin, “Evolution and the Theory of Games,”
Journal of Theoretical Biology
1 (1961), 382–403; interview with Richard Lewontin, December 31, 2007; on the history of the divide Lewontin alludes to, see James Schwartz, “Population Genetics and Sociobiology: Conflicting Views of Evolution,”
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine
45, no. 2 (2002), 224–40.

12.
Maynard Smith eventually published
The Evolution of Sex
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

13.
John Maynard Smith, “Evolution and the Theory of Games,”
American Scientist
64 (1976), 41–45.

14.
Maynard Smith later explained that he was aware of the “unbeatable strategy” term in Hamilton’s 1967 paper, but hadn’t registered this as influencing his ideas when formalizing the ESS. “In Haldane’s Footsteps,” 352.

15.
Ibid.; George Price letter to Richard Lewontin, September 15, 1970. I thank Dick Lewontin for providing me with their correspondence.

16.
George Price letter to John Maynard Smith, August 9, 1971, GPP.

17.
George R. Price, “Extension of Covariance Selection Mathematics,”
Annals of Human Genetics
35 (1972), 485–90. George had recently learned (and acknowledged in this paper) that Alan Robertson had published a covariance selection equation prior and similar to his own in a somewhat obscurely placed article, “A Mathematical Model of the Culling Process in Dairy Cattle,”
Animal Production
8 (1966), 95–108. Robertson, however, a researcher more concerned with breeding practice than evolution, had not added the second, transmission term to his equation, meaning that it was not expansible to multiple levels of selection, which was the whole beauty of George’s approach. A few months after George’s own derivation of the equation, the mathematical biologist Joel E. Cohen, then at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, independently derived the covariance relationship (again, without its expansible component) in an attempt to determine whether the differential use of legal abortions by people of varying socioeconomic or educational status had a positive or negative selective effect on measured IQ. It was published nine months after George’s
Nature
paper as “Legal Abortions, Socioeconomic Status, and Measured Intelligence in the United States,”
Social Biology
18 (1971), 55–63. Cohen had derived the covariance from what he took to be “an easy consequence” of the formula for the selection differential published by the eminent Edinburgh quantitative geneticist Douglas S. Falconer, and was therefore not all impressed by either his or, when he learned of it, George’s, originality. See, D. S. Falconer, “Genetic Consequences of Selection Pressure,” in
Genetic and Environmental Factors in Human Ability
, ed. J. E. Meade and A. S. Parkes (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1966), 219–32. There was a further antecedent to the covariance equation that George was unaware of, once again without the second term: C. C. Li, “Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection,”
Nature
214 (1967), 505–6. I thank Joel Cohen, now a professor at the Laboratory of Populations at Rockefeller and Columbia Universities, for correspondence about this matter throughout May 2008.

18.
George Price letter to Frieda (last name not known), May 29, 1971, GPP.

19.
Lewontin would summarize his finding in the classic book
The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).

20.
Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species
, 84; Motoo Kimura original paper was “Evolutionary Rate at the Molecular Level,”
Nature
217 (1968), 624–26. His major findings were later summarized in his book
The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). There is much literature on the history of the neutralism debate, see in particular Michael Dietrich, “The Origins of the Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution,”
Journal of the History of Biology
27 (1994), 21–59, and James F. Crow, “Motoo Kimura and the Rise of Neutralism,” in
Rebels, Mavericks, and Heretics in Biology
, ed. Oren Harman and Michael Dietrich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 265–81.

21.
George viewed the genetic polymorphism work as a “digression” from the “Sex and Rapid Evolution” paper he was working on at the time but undertook it nevertheless since he felt it would help him better understand a point involved in the sex paper: George Price letter to John Maynard Smith, April 20, 1972; “Antlers” File, John Maynard Smith Papers, British Library (BLJMSC).

22.
Harry Harris, “Polymorphism and Protein Evolution: The Neural Mutation–Random Drift Hypothesis,”
Journal of Medical Genetics
8, no. 4 (December 1971) 444–52; “A Theoretical Investigation into Genetic Polymorphism,” MRC application for a project grant, signed by Cedric A. B. Smith, January 31, 1973, BL:KPX1_10.2.

23.
George Price letter to Paul Samuelson, August 19, 1972, GPP. Samuelson had become interested in population genetics and written a short article on “The Hardy-Who Law of Genetics?” in March 1971, which he now sent to George.

24.
George Price letter to John Maynard Smith, April 20, 1972.

25.
The model used the following probabilities: Probability of serious injury from a single D play = 0. 10. Probability that a “Prober-Retaliator” will probe on the opening move or after opponent has played C = 0. 05. Probability that “Retaliator” or “Prober-Retaliator” will retaliate against a probe (if not injured) by opponent = 1. 0. Payoffs were calculated as follows: Payoff for winning = +60. Payoff for receiving serious injury = -100. Payoff for each D received that does not cause serious injury (a “scratch”) = -2. Payoff for saving time and energy (awarded to each contestant not seriously injured) varied from 0 for a contest of maximum length to +20 for a very short contest.

26.
George Price letter to Kathleen Price, August 5, 1972, GPP.

27.
George Price letter to John Maynard Smith, October 19, 1972, BLJMSC.

28.
Ibid.

29.
John Maynard Smith letter to George Price, October 24, 1972, BLJMSC; Bill Hamilton letter to George Price, November 22, 1972, BL:KPX1_4.14.

30.
George Price letter to Frieda (last name not known), May 29, 1971, GPP; Interview with Sam Berry, May 5, 2008.

31.
George Price letter to Dr. Webb, December 21, 1972, GPP; George Price letter to the Home Office, Immigration and Nationality Department, December 28, 1972, GPP.

32.
George Price letter to Annamarie Price, January 23, 1973, GPP.

33.
The Latin is: “Amicabilia quae sunt ad alterum vererunt amicabilibus quae sunt ad seipsum.” Aristotle,
Nichomachean Ethics
, book IX, chapter 4.

34.
Thomas Aquinas,
The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas
5 vols., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981); David Hume,
A Treatise of Human Nature
(1739), ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 521.

35.
Adam Smith,
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
, 2 vols., ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), I.ii.2, 26–27; Bernard Mandeville,
The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits
, 4th ed. (London: J. Tonson, 1725), vol. 1, 9.

36.
Andrew Brown, “The Kindness of Strangers,”
The Guardian
, August 27, 2005; Roger Bingham, “Trivers in America,”
Science
80 (March–April 1980), 56–67; communication with Robert Trivers, May 27, 2008.

37.
Robert Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,”
Quarterly Review of Biology
46 (1971), 35–57. For a description of writing this paper see Trivers,
Natural Selection and Social Theory
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3–18.