The Price of Altruism (9 page)

K
atie was on her back, legs spread in the air, sweating and panting. Her husband, George, the second half of the successful art-auctioning house Robinson & Fisher, was at her side in the spacious Hampstead bedroom. It was February 17, 1890, and the baby was on its way.

A silence fell over the room. She was deeply religious, which made comprehension of what had happened more difficult. Minutes passed, accompanied by anguished moans. George looked to the side. Katie closed her eyes. The baby had been stillborn.

Just as the midwife was getting ready to clean her up there was a quiver. And a kick. And another. Katie kindled. Something was still alive inside her! Moments later a second baby was pulled out into the world, as tiny as a pink grain of rice, and entirely unexpected. His mother named him Ronald Aylmer Fisher, his friends called him “Piggy,” and he would grow to become the man who built the mathematical foundations of evolution.
¹

“I attempted mathematics,” Darwin wrote toward the end of his days, “…but I got on very slowly…. I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics; for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.”
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Darwin had not been entombed fifteen years when, at the age of three, little Ronnie asked his nanny what a half of a half was. And a half of that. And a half of that. “Then I suppose a half of a sixteenth must be a thirtytoof,” he said.
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When he was fourteen his beloved and devout mother died prematurely of peritonitis and numbers became his world. Hampered by poor eyesight, he developed a geometrical imagination, learning to figure out problems in his head rather than writing them down on paper. Many of England’s brightest had come up through Harrow, but his tutor, Arthur Vassall, would later divide his untold brilliants into two categories: Fisher and all the rest. Mathematically he was unparalleled. Still, when a school prize offered the winner a choice of books, Piggy’s selection divulged a second love that would draw him just as powerfully: Coming to Cambridge on a mathematics scholarship, he darted up to his quarters at Gonville and Caius lugging a suitcase packed with thirteen volumes: the complete works of Charles Darwin.

It was 1909, the Darwin centenary and the jubilee year of the publication of
The Origin of Species
. An anonymous donor had endowed a chair “to be devoted to that branch of biology now entitled Genetics,” a term that had been invented three years earlier by the mustachioed Mendelian, William Bateson. Still, the electric excitement could not conceal the brewing tension: Bateson’s
Mendel’s Principles of Heredity
and Francis Darwin’s edition of his father’s unpublished essays of 1842 and 1844 were both being printed by Cambridge University Press at the other end of King’s Parade from Fisher, literal bookends of a fractious biological world. Mendelism and Darwinism were at war.
⁴

How had this happened?

Darwin’s theory of evolution only worked if there was enough new constant variation for natural selection to play with. But as the eccentric Scottish engineer (and dramatist, linguist, actor, and critic) Fleeming Jenkin had pointed out at the time, since the heredities of mother and father
blend
, red and white resulting in pink, populations would be eternally regressing to the mean. Evolution, that is, would be stuck in the mud before it ever got started, for any new variations would be quickly “swamped” into mediocrity. Darwin stuttered. What was needed, he knew, was precisely what he and his generation lacked: a proper theory of heredity.
⁵

When the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel’s laws of heredity were rediscovered at the turn of the century they might have been Darwin’s saving grace but for the fact that so many took them to be the last nail in his metaphorical coffin. After all, the kinds of dramatic “mutations” the Mendelians were beholding, those that turned a fly’s eyes from red to white, or its wings from straight to wrinkly, were a far cry from the supposed tiny variations Darwin’s natural selection was “daily and hourly scrutinizing.” They were spontaneous disruptive sports, not gradual continuous fluctuations.
⁶

Darwinians (calling themselves “biometricians”) were doubtful about the existence of invisible discrete “genes”—figments, they thought, of the Mendelians’ overwrought imagination. Enough to score phenotypes, without falling into flights of fancy; if there was such a thing as genetics, it might be good for lab flies but not much else. Still, Bateson and his gang were not about to relinquish Nature’s playing field, and they rejected the notion of the laboratory artifact. Even if they couldn’t be seen, genes were as real as the dew-covered jacket of a
Pisum
. Internally generated, mutations rendered external selection superfluous: Darwin’s great theory was wrong.

Fisher was the kind of chap who would always walk through a revolving door first. His legs were short, his shoulders narrow, and with a pointy reddish beard adorning a massive head, he could look like a keen, deliberate terrier. His father might have lost his fortune by now, but Ron was encouraged by a different kind of nobility, unbeholden to possessions. Together with a group of Cambridge friends he formed a select society, the We Frees, immersing itself in whiskey, the songs of Catholic reactionary Hilaire Belloc, bicycle excursions to the countryside, picnics, Icelandic sagas, a secret language, and Nietzsche.

Anglican by birth and even more by maternal devotion, Fisher held on to God while aspiring to become one. “What man is to the ape,” he quoted Zarathustra in a talk he delivered as a student to the newly formed Eugenics Education Society in 1913, “a joke and a sore shame: so shall man be to beyond-man, a joke and a sore shame,” adding, in his own words: “We can set no limit to human potentialities; all that is best in man can be bettered.”
⁷

War would reveal man’s truest and purest mettle. Between shrieking bullets and thudding cannons echoes of “beyond-man” would be heard. In the eugenic vein he suggested that winners of the Military Cross be encouraged to procreate beyond their fraction, fortifying civilization, inching it closer to its “potentialities.” Whether the “submerged tenth,” the dregs of society, were reproducing faster than everybody else was of little concern to him. It was the noble, not the base, which counted in his universe. Strength, gallantry, intelligence, moral fiber: All were of a constitution; like prime beef, and top-grade milk, they could be bred in the right bodies to produce more of their kind.
⁸

Except that Fisher himself would never step on the battlefield: On account of impaired eyesight he’d been rejected for military service. A First from Cambridge could hardly blunt this slight, though his chosen, the naïve seventeen-year-old Eileen Guinness, whom he called Nicolette, after the heroine in a medieval troubadour’s tale, might dampen it through some serious procreation. Meanwhile, it would be his younger brother Alwyn who would represent the family in the Great War.

Beset by temporary feelings of inadequacy, Fisher followed Belloc’s cry, “one man, three acres and a cow,” moving his new family from London to the Berkshire countryside and leasing a gamekeeper’s cottage and some land. Perhaps a man’s mettle could be shown by subsisting off small farming short of charging ahead courageously in battle. Still, “going natural” would have to be bridled by civility; he was a Hampstead boy, after all. While he was off in the day teaching math at Bradford College, it was Nicolette and her We Free sister Geraldine (dubbed Gudruna) who tended to the chickens, pigs, and cow. At night they’d convene to read out loud from Frazer’s
Golden Bough
and Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, debating the fate of civilization. Then the news arrived one pleasant morning: Alwyn had been killed in action.
⁹

It was around that time in 1918 that Fisher wrote a mathematical paper for the
Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
that would change the history of science.
¹⁰
Fifty years after that city’s son had set his teeth into Darwin, Ron penned his reply-by-proxy to the long-deceased Fleeming Jenkin. The problem of variation could be overcome. With just a little bit of explaining, biometrician arms outstretched to choke Mendelian throats could be transformed into embracing appendages.

Here was the problem and its solution: The biometricians rejected genes because no one had ever seen them. But they also snubbed them on theoretical grounds. Scoring a population trait like height, for example, revealed a smooth bell curve, not isolated bars, and this was true for the overwhelming traits in nature. How could genes be responsible for such variation, if they produced large, discontinuous “mutations”? Fisher’s reply was that the smooth curve could be explained by imagining small mutations working on many underlying genes. If traits were the result of lots of genes, each affecting them just slightly, the angular could be made to flow. Hereditary factors were discrete, this much was obvious, but their products would look effortlessly continuous!
¹¹

Here, finally, was a mind-blowing reply to the incredulous Scot with the unlikely name: Genes and their chromosome abodes were immortal. Unlike paint, they did not blend. Whether they were dominant and expressed or recessive and latent, whether they interacted (“epistasis”) or were simply additive, they passed from generation to generation more faithfully than endowments and even surnames. Mendelians thought they’d buried Darwin’s mechanism with their own, but not only did genetics solve the conundrum of blending, it provided the missing piece to the puzzle of evolution. Since “swamping” was not a problem, variation would be preserved and natural selection’s diet securely protected. Evolution moved along by the shuffling and selection of adaptive genetic mutations.
¹²

Fleeming’s fulmination could be put to everlasting rest. From their Westminster Abbey and Brno monastery graves, Darwin and Mendel were finally being wed.

“Oh, it’s you!” said His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales when the reeling lieutenant with the banged-up head plumped heavily into his military vehicle. It was May 1915, the Battle of Aubers Ridge, and J. B. S. Haldane needed a ride to the infirmary.
¹³

The Haldanes were descendants of a Scottish military clan employed by Lowland farmers to protect their cattle from Highlanders’ raids. By the time Jack was born in Oxford on Guy Fawkes Night, 1892, they were an intellectual and political powerhouse. His maternal namesake, great-uncle John Burdon Sanderson, was the first Waynflete Professor of Physiology at Oxford. His father’s brother Richard Burden Haldane had been the secretary of state for war and lord chancellor for successive Liberal governments. And his father, John Scott Haldane, known to loved ones as “Uffer,” had gained a reputation as the most fearless scientist in the history of Britain.
¹⁴

A world expert on mines and what gases and explosions do to the men who work in them, Uffer was famous for sealing himself into chambers to breathe in lethal gases and record their effects on body and mind; for descending into shafts, the underground, and submarines. It was something of a joke in the Haldane home on the banks of the Cherwell River that a succession of identical telegrams would arrive after Uffer had been summoned to investigate a mine disaster: It wasn’t that he felt overly obliged to calm every one’s nerves back home (such sentiment would be very un-Haldane-like), it was simply that the carbon monoxide had gotten to his memory. Like his wife’s uncle, he was an Oxford professor of physiology, but he also loved philosophy, especially the idealism of Kant and the dialectics of Hegel.
¹⁵
In the tradition of Darwin and Huxley, he did his science from home assisted by his children. Beside the lab and dairy farm, there were three hundred guinea pigs on the lawn, two of them named Bateson and Punnett after England’s leading geneticists. In a loving but unvarnished way, Jack and his baby sister Naomi were their human counterparts.

“Friends, Romans, countrymen,” Jack began in the bowels of a North Staffordshire mine. He was eight years old, the story went, and Uffer had instructed him to stand up and recite from
Julius Caesar
. He collapsed just as he had arrived at “the noble Brutus.” When he later came to on the ground above, he had learned the salutary lesson that methane is lighter than air and innocuous. That was the nature of the bond between Uffer and “Boy” a correct reply to “What’s the formula to soda-lime?” winning him a trip to a submarine, a mastering of the pressure tables—a job testing decompression suits for the navy. When he was thrown off the backseat of Uffer’s bike one day, speeding down South Park Road, the doctors at the Radcliffe Infirmary didn’t think the little assistant would make it. But despite a cracked skull he recovered; by some unknown miasma, friends would later say, the accident had turned a bright boy into a genius.

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.
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