Harman Oren Solomon. The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness

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unemployment by cutting wages, no promised panacea. What was needed instead

was active government intervention: Public works, deficit spending,

redistributive taxation, the lowering of long-term interest rates. In short, if society

was to be stable over time, it would need to abandon the Invisible Hand in favor of

the welfare state.

“Nonsense!” Knight wrote in the margins of his copy of Keynes’s book, alongside

more powerful expletives. Nonsense, Chicago colleague and expert on

monopolies Aaron Director, a “mordant critic” of governmental and social

institutions, concurred. Nonsense, agreed Henry Simons, down the hall, author of

A Positive Program for Laissez-Faire. Most combative of all was Jacob Viner, “a

strutting Talmudic Napoleon with facial expression alternating at express-train

speed between joviality, challenge and utter contempt.”

Challenging Keynes,

Viner took welfare economics to the ring. Markets had to be left free, competition

unencumbered. “Survival of the fittest” was the name of the game, intervention a

curse of maudlin sensibilities. Man was selfish, but selfishness was not a curse.

On the contrary, it was the true and only road to happiness.

It was said of Viner that his self-appointed task in life was destroying students’

confidence. When in the fall of 1932, a young four-foot-eleven-inch Brooklyn

boy, son of immigrant parents from Carpatho-Ruthenia, shuffled into the

classroom to attend Economics 301, like everyone else he was trembling. Unlike

his fellow students, though, Milton Friedman would one day teach the very same

course, becoming the leader of the intellectual movement that would challenge

Keynes and the welfare state. Others would argue about precisely when it had all

started, but the Chicago School of Economics was on its way.

Darwin had pondered over the mystery of sterile insect castes, and so now did a

new Chicago recruit. After a decade training at Cornell, teaching in Pittsburgh,

and knee crawling in the jungles of British Guiana, Alfred Emerson arrived at the

Chicago Biology Department in 1929 with termites on his mind.

He was the premier expert; when he retired his personal collection consisted of 91

percent of the known species in the world.

His eyes were exceptionally dark,

glistening like plums dipped in cold water. Easygoing and gregarious, he exuded

the air of the confident son of a respected scholar of classical archaeology. Still,

there was a problem that was killing him. Just like ants, termites were divided into

castes, but how did such different castes arise? Were soldier and worker termites

genetically determined before hatching, or did some environmental factor, like

food, fashion individuals as they developed: for soldiers, ferocious fighting

mandibles; for workers, special digestive systems for consuming cellulose. It was

difficult to know. After all, at birth all termites are identical.

Good thing, then, that Sewall Wright was in the room next door. Recruited by

Chicago in 1926 for his prodigious mathematical and statistical skills, he had yet

to develop the evolutionary model that, alongside Fisher and Haldane, would

soon make him famous. But he did have a theory about how genes worked:

Particular chemical cues activated particular genes in particular ways; they could

mutate them or turn them on or off. The genes would then activate particular

physiological gradients, depending on the chemical cue they had gotten, directing

genetically identical organisms to morph into entirely distinct creatures. That’s

how development proceeded: The organism, Wright believed, was a “highly

self-regulatory system of reaction” it was a mass of disparate parts each doing its

thing to bring about an integrated whole.

Emerson liked analogies. Just like organisms, colonies were integrated biological

systems. Like genes and chemical cues and physiological gradients, termite

warriors and toilers and queens and kings each sang their own particular aria.

Whether a newborn termite would develop into a soldier or worker depended on

the relative complex of castes in the colony—the analog to Wright’s chemical

cues. It was one big coordinated opera. Far from a random aggregation of

individuals, a termite colony was in fact a “superorganism,” a system so well

integrated that it assumed a life of its own.

This had been the idea of a scholar Emerson had met on his knees in the jungles of

British Guiana. In fact the Harvard entomologist William Morton Wheeler was so

convinced that the colonies of social insects were like a single individual that he

saw no difference whatsoever between sterile workers toiling for the nest and a

heart pumping for the good of the body. With the help of Wright’s fancy

physiological genetics, Emerson could now apply Wheeler’s superorganism to

explain termite evolution. Cooperation was a by-product of specialization of

function. Ultimately it existed because individuals were subordinate to the

whole.

“Homeostasis” was the key. Coined in 1926 by the physiologist Walter B.

Cannon, the term referred to the properties of self-control, regulation, and

maintenance that ensured the stability of internal environments, like body

temperature in mammals. Once again turning to analogy, Emerson replaced

“internal environment” with “population,” fashioning homeostasis an ecological,

not just a physiological, principle. “Just as the cell in the body functions for the

benefit of the whole organism,” he wrote, “so does the individual organism

become subordinate to the population.” Homeostasis was the solution to the

conflict between part and whole; in the tug-of-war between the interest of the

individual and the good of the group, the balance leading to stability was where

the rope had to be fastened.

It had been a cool autumn day in September 1921 when Allee stepped into his new

office at the University of Chicago. In the spirit of the Economics Department, the

chair, Frank Lillie, had declared the subjects of investigation in the Department of

Biology to furnish the basic scientific foundations for social control. Nature was

humanity’s normative guide, the ecologist its healer. To help bring peace to the

world he would plummet into her secret depths, rising with prescriptions. Allee’s

heart was racing. Lake Forest was behind him. At the University of Chicago he’d

be going straight to work in the service of civilization. His scientific experiments,

he told his new colleagues, would be designed to throw light on the subject of

war.

Everything revolved around animal aggregations.

Bats aggregate in caves, mussels at their bed sites, prairie chickens at their

booming grounds, iguanas on rocks to stay warm. Countless examples existed in

nature of individuals clumping up in groups. Why did they do it? Wouldn’t such

behavior put them all in grave danger, prey to a ruthless lucky predator, or

otherwise doomed to an ill-fated turn of the environment? Dozens of studies

showed not only that aggregating was dangerous but also that it led to stunted

growth, low rates of reproduction, weak off spring, even unexplained death. If

individual struggle for existence was Nature’s avenue, why would a mussel seek

out friends with whom to consort?

The only possible answer was that groups offered individuals benefits after all.

Allee began looking for them in his beloved isopods: Placing ten groups of the

creatures alongside ten solitary specimens, all of them on filter paper, he was able

to show that the groups retained water much more successfully. Here was proof

that cooperative aggregation helps isopods deal with dry environments where

retention of water is crucial.

Next he turned to starfish. When he put them in containers with no eelgrass,

immediately they clumped together into groups; when he planted eelgrass, the

groups disbanded. Was this not proof enough that assembly provides protection in

the absence of natural cover? Sea urchins, too, demonstrated how beneficial

group life could be: The more fertilized eggs present in one area, the faster did

they all divide and develop, becoming free-swimming larvae at significantly

accelerated speeds. Life in groups held enormous benefits for individuals.

Allee admitted that above certain numbers aggregations became dangerous, but as

long as these numbers weren’t reached, aggregations conferred benefits on every

and all. “Stranger” mussels came together because it was good for them. Nature

had appointed cooperation her chief executor.

Neither tainted with German Darwinism nor plagued with biological

determinism, aggregations were about unrelated animals cooperating to adjust to

their surroundings; evolution and genetics were beside the point. But if the

simplest of creatures were continually aiding each other, if cooperation was the

rule of the sea cucumber and urchin, then surely there was a lesson to be learned

by humans.

Animal communities and human communities, after all, were part of the very

same developmental process: individuals reacting to their environments by

coming together, slowly learning to tolerate one another, gaining attractions to

one another, then acting in coordination, then finally cooperating. So universal

was this succession that for Allee it became a part of the very definition of life.

Living beings, he wrote, all reproduce their kind, and all are continually adjusting

to their environment. But a creature had also to show “at least the forerunners of

cooperation” without this it wouldn’t be counted as living.

Finally, biology and Quakerism had united. Even though they knew better in their

gut, early Friends could not counteract the claims of hard-boiled militarists; “they

had no proof,” Allee wrote, “of the correctness of their position on this

fundamental point.” Now things had changed. “There is abundant evidence from

modern science that the centuries old Quaker attitude to war is correct.” Those

who believed that science lends support to the present war system in settling

international disagreements were relying on a false, outmoded phase of the

biological understanding of the nature of life. Far from being smothered by

competition, cooperation was possible precisely because the individual was

important. It was through his seeking out of others that all the goodness in the

world was born.

Allee had melded politics, faith, and science into a comprehensive philosophy,

good for planarians, insects, and humans. The social Darwinists were wrong

because Huxley was wrong; it was Kropotkin who got it right. And, he added with

a crack of home-grown Indiana pride, “It is to our glory that we Quakers

attempted at all times to substitute cooperation for struggle.”

Then came World War II.

Back in Princeton, von Neumann was as usual. He was not convinced by Quaker

biology, nor, for that matter, by the view of human nature advanced by the

advocates of the welfare state. Joining forces with Oskar Morgenstern, a tall,

imposing Viennese émigré, he produced a twelve-hundred-page formula-filled

tome, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, to cover all eventualities.

“Economists simply don’t know what science means,” Morgenstern, who claimed

to be the grandson of Frederick III of Germany, wrote in his diary in 1942. “I am

more and more of the opinion that Keynes is a scientific charlatan, and his

followers not even that.”

Morgenstern and von Neumann would change things.

“We hope to establish satisfactorily,” the authors wrote, “that the typical

problems of economic behavior become strictly identical with the mathematical

notions of suitable games of strategy.”

As surely as tic-tac-toe, economics demanded precise strategy. When von

Neumann would travel from Princeton to visit the Cowles Commission for

Research in Economics at the University of Chicago, all the professors lined up

like children to present him with problems they couldn’t solve.

There was a buzz

when he walked in, briskly, as was his fashion. But this was greater, people

whispered, than mere economics: Von Neumann was the first man to crack the

code of human behavior.

From Sewall Wright, Emerson had learned that natural selection acted not just on

individuals but also on populations; mathematically speaking, “group selection”

was possible. Wright’s math was complicated and its implications

counterintuitive: Sometimes what was bad for the individual could actually be

good for the group. Once again Emerson turned to analogy. In the Kaibab forest

of Arizona, pumas were known to prey on deer. At the individual level the

competition between every puma and every deer was a ruthless struggle for

survival: Either a puma killed or starved, either a deer escaped or was eaten. But at

a higher level pumas were actually regulating the deer population; when man

hunted too many pumas, deer numbers quickly got out of control, and this was

bad for everyone. If natural selection could “see” populations, choosing more

successful ones for a given environment over others, evolution could flip intuition

on its head: Competition could be considered beneficial, even cooperative. It all

depended on the perspective.

And, of course, on homeostasis. Only homeostasis had allowed organisms,

aggregated in groups, to take control of their lives in face of hostile environments.

It was homeostasis that led termites to triumph and the Kaibab forest to flourish

and grow. The more homeostasis, the more evolution moved away from conflict

and competition. In “The Biological Basis of Social Cooperation,” Emerson

offered his prescription: If the probability of survival of the population depended

on the degree to which individuals had adjusted themselves to one another and to

the environment, then a little bit of sacrifice on the part of individuals was not all

that much to ask for. The motto was “United we stand, divided we fall” if

individual freedom threatened group stability, in the interest of “peace, well-being

and progress” it would have to be carefully controlled.

George Gaylord Simpson was having none of it. Recently the goateed,

pointy-eared paleontologist had been measuring his walks across Harvard Yard in

political teaspoons: There was the landing on Normandy, the march on Berlin, the

disintegration of the Nazis. Finally the Third Reich had been felled. But what was

this pabulum coming out of Chicago? Hitler was dead in his bunker, and one

Hitler had been enough. “The evolutionary analogy suggests,” he wrote,

that the epiorganism will and should evolve in the direction of greater integration

(i.e. less individual freedom and responsibility), and that its units (i.e. you and I)

should become more specialized (with less scope for activity and change), more

interdependent (less self-reliant), and more a part of the whole state (less

individual)…. Then the biologist finds himself face to face with the fact that this is

a totalitarian idea.

The “aggregation ethics” of these Chicago men was all the same: the

“superorganism,” group selection, social control. It all just sounded too eerily

familiar. For him groups were nothing more than a collectivity of individuals;

they had no life of their own. It was the individual who was the fundamental unit

of selection, not the group. The individual had motored all that was good and

noble in evolution—intelligence, knowledge, and of course responsibility.

Emerson believed that nature should be mankind’s moral beacon, and Simpson

concurred: Ethics needed to be naturalized. Still, the Chicago man thought

stability could be bought only at the price of constraints on individual freedom;

for Simpson freedom was the cornerstone of democracy.

Difficult questions lingered. What if democracy wasn’t the best system, after all?

What if totalitarian regimes maintained “homeostasis” more effectively? Fascism

had led to destruction and been defeated. But could man compete in ways that

were socially cooperative? Kropotkin and Huxley had sparred over the true nature

of mankind. In the absence of a clear verdict, was it safe to abandon society to the

ideal of individual freedom?

Emerson leaned back in his chair, unperturbed. Now that the war was over, it was

time to return to the wiser ways of nature, where a hopeful balance had been born.

“The issue is clear,” he declared just a few months after Nagasaki. “It is

cooperation or vaporization. It is a struggle for existence by means of the

cooperation of all mankind, or extinction through unnatural destructive

competition between individuals, classes, races and nations already incorporated

into a larger interdependent whole.” His conviction resounded through the halls of

the Department of Biology at Chicago like the din of a sea of termites marching

up a woodland hill.

Over in the Met Lab, bending over uranium, the young George Price remained

completely oblivious.

Milton Friedman, Viner’s former trembling student, arrived back at the

University of Chicago in 1946, just as George was leaving.

During the war he had worked on tax policy at the Treasury Department, and

emerged with a one-track mind. “Everything reminds Milton Friedman of the

money supply,” economist Robert Solow complained. “Everything reminds me of

sex, but I try to keep it out of my papers.” Still, Friedman was formidable.

Everyone loves to argue with Milton, his Chicago colleague George Schultz used

to say, especially when he isn’t there.

He had a winning smile, a balding head,

and oversize glasses. The nineteenth-century liberal regarded an extension of

freedom as the best way to promote welfare and equality but nowadays a liberal

was someone who saw welfare and equality as either prerequisites of freedom or

its alternatives. Friedman was on a crusade: He was going to reclaim the mantle of

classical liberalism.

It wouldn’t be easy. Memories of the Great Depression and of war still lingered,

and men looked to government for answers. Keynes was a hero. When Friedman

published Capitalism and Freedom more than a decade and a half after World

War II, neither the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Herald Tribune, Time nor

Newsweek even reviewed it.

Still, as John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty had been for

the nineteenth century, so would Friedman’s book become for the twentieth: a

manifesto on freedom. The problem, just as for Allee, was one of integration.

Literally millions of people were involved in providing one another with their

daily bread, let alone their yearly automobiles. How could such interdependence

be reconciled with individual freedom?

In Russia the solution had been to concentrate economic power and political

power in the very same hands. To Friedman this spelled catastrophe. All forms of

collectivism necessarily lead to tyranny; economically and politically speaking a

centralized economy was “the road to serfdom.”

On the other hand, viewed as a

means to the end of political freedom, the economy could be made to disperse

power and do away with coercion. The key was for economic power and political

power to be made separate so that they could off set each other, and the best way

to do that was to free markets and encourage private enterprise exchange. Adam

Smith had been right all along: The Invisible Hand born of individual self-seeking

was the key to collective prosperity.

Friedman would have loved to be an anarchist, like Kropotkin. Unfortunately he

was all too well aware that individual freedoms often collide. “My freedom to

move my fist,” the Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas had put it, “must

be limited by the proximity of your chin.”

Government was necessary to provide

a means to modify and mediate the rules of the game, and to punish anyone who

would break them. Still, the hand of intervention had to be circumscribed as much

as possible, just as Kropotkin had wanted. Their reasons for agreement were

diametrically opposed: The Russian prince thought creatures were naturally

cooperative and therefore needed neither coercion nor direction. The son of

Russian immigrants, on the other hand, thought men were naturally competitive

and that competition always leads to the best results. It was the Invisible Hand of

the market, after all, that would safeguard welfare and equality. More

fundamentally, it would protect mankind’s most precious treasure: freedom, that

“rare and delicate plant.”

Back in the Zoology Department, Allee was breathing in the winds of change. He

had always argued that cooperation was all about the individual: the individual

adjusting to its environment, the individual adjusting to other organisms, the

individual becoming a part of the group. It was physiology that drove things, the

challenge of reacting to the environment. Huxley had taken the Darwinian

struggle for existence to be nothing but a bloody war. But Darwin was softer: “A

plant on the edge of a desert,” he had written, “is said to struggle for life against

the drought.” Like Kropotkin, Allee trained his gaze there: to where the chronicle

of nature bespoke organisms coming together to fight the elements to survive, not

of a ruthless bellum omnium contra omnes. Cooperation was the happy result of

organisms reacting to things like the chemistry of gases and the physics of

camouflage.

Down the hall, though, Emerson had gotten to him. Far from simply being about

individual physiology, aggregation was a problem in population biology. Perhaps

it was the group, after all, which counted more than the individual. Perhaps a

starfish aggregated not simply to adjust to a lack of cover but because natural

selection favored groups that clumped together over those that didn’t. Signs of

paralysis had appeared in Allee’s legs back in 1930, and operations were

performed to remove the growth. In 1938 a third operation had left his legs

paralyzed. Now in a wheelchair and more dependent than ever, he wondered

about the “superorganism” and the meaning of integration of the individual with

the whole.

Emerson had argued that the individual was to the population as the cell was to the

body. But if integration was to be studied properly, Allee thought, analogies

would not suffice. If populations had their own unique traits, if the

“superorganism” really was alive, he wanted to know how it worked. Chickens

would provide him with answers.

As with many social animals, chicken life revolved around a hierarchy:

Low-ranking hens lost a great proportion of their fights to higher-ranking ones, all

the way up to the dominant hen at the very top.

Allee knew that dominant hens

laid more eggs than subordinates. This made it look as if selection were simply

working on individuals: the stronger and more aggressive gaining a larger

representation in future generations. If that were true, integration would be

meaningless. Just as Simpson had argued, groups would be collections of

individuals and nothing more.

Impressed by Wright’s group-selection equations, he searched for a different

explanation and together with a student soon made an encouraging discovery:

Socially unstable flocks ate less, were scrawnier, laid fewer eggs, and had smaller

combs than flocks where hierarchy was well established. Not only that: Once

dominance-subordination relationships were stable, overall aggression dropped

dramatically. Hierarchy was a group property, after all, a wise and benevolent

integrating mechanism. The road to Mount Harmony traveled through the

Lowlands of Competition.

It was a satisfying solution but it left Allee cold. Competition, after all, wasn’t

supposed to be part of the natural equation. And yet here, and in the “higher”

vertebrates of all creatures, it seemed a cardinal ingredient for survival. What

would the Friends think of that?

Just two months before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in June 1945, Allee had made

the problem clear in an article in the New Republic. Not only was competition a

part of the game, it necessarily would lead to instability and bloodshed. “Sooner

or later,” he wrote,

on the international stage as among our groups of mice, or fish, or hens, or other

animals, a subordinate always seriously challenges the alpha individual or

nation. Although the challenger may be beaten back, often many times, eventually

alpha rank is taken over by a new despot and the cycle starts again. In so far as

any new international organization is based primarily on a hierarchy of power, as

are the peck orders of the chicken pens, the peace that follows its apparent

acceptance will be relatively short and troubled. Permanent peace is not to be

won following the precedent established by the dominance of vertebrate

animals.

If Nature was mankind’s moral compass, what was to be done? Was civilization

condemned to eternal cycles of bloodshed?

He cringed at the thought. To be sure, sea urchins and chickens had taught him

that there were two forces acting in nature: “the self-centered egoistic drives

which lead to personal advancement and self-preservation, and the

group-centered, more-or-less altruistic drives that lead to the preservation of the

group.” But how, ultimately, was the circle to be squared? Weighing the

alternatives, he finally came down on the side of goodness. “After much

consideration, it is my mature conclusion…that the cooperative forces are

biologically the more important and vital.” Hierarchy and dominance, after all,

were a mark of the social vertebrates alone; if one considered the bigger picture,

they were just one tiny branch on the great tree of cooperative life. Competition

had arrived late in the evolutionary game. Man was a vertebrate, all right, but he

needed to learn from the isopods.

To rise to the challenge he would have to break down barriers, not erect them.

Gender, family, races, nations: all only ever led to division. Like isopods,

independent humans didn’t have to be related to come to one another’s aid. They

needn’t be of the same race or nationality. All they needed to do was to act toward

one another as if they were closest of kin. It was the cooperative instinct of the

individual, not the exclusive politics of the family, where goodness and altruism

had come from. But now it was time to graduate to the next level. Once

individuals came together, the “superorganism” could be born, gaining a life of its

own. Then, like all good things, it would be selected by evolution.

Sitting slouched in his wheelchair, the “Hustlin’ Quaker” took a moment to

reflect. It had been a long journey: from Indiana to Chicago, from believer to

scientific pacifist, from ecologist of the individual to evolutionist of the group.

His friend Emerson saw cooperation as a mechanism of homeostasis, a means to

accomplish an end. But by now Allee had learned that life was much less

utilitarian. Far from a means to an end, peaceful cooperation had been Nature’s

initial design, her honeyed Garden of Eden. With such thoughts in his heart, he

wheeled his chair down to the South End of Chicago, where he’d be helping to

build interracial summer camps for black and white children. At long last he knew

what he believed in: education as deliverance, biology as morality, the peaceful

group, mercifully, both the end and cherished goal. Man had come a long way but

mustn’t abandon the wisdom of his evolutionary past. It was time to return to the

ways of the starfish.

Behind guarded gates in terra cotta and putty white midrises just a block from the

Santa Monica beach, they sat in swivel chairs in cubbies twiddling pencils and

making jokes.

There were no rules: Surfing, semantics, outer space, Finnish phonology,

neurosis, the Arab class system, a hermeneutic study of the writings of Lenin, an

analysis of the popular toy-store puzzle “Instant Insanity”…they could study

whatever tickled their fancy. The official air force contract called it “research on

intercontinental warfare,” but mainly they were being paid to “think the

unthinkable”: How many casualties would there be if a nuclear bomb were

dropped on Cleveland? How would Washington know? How should

intercontinental ballistic missiles be developed? What were the odds of a Soviet

attack, the pros and cons of an American one?

The RAND Corporation was a civilian nonprofit think tank chartered in March

1948. For an elite cadre of physicists, mathematicians, economists, and political

scientists, it was the Cold War equivalent of Los Alamos. Pravda called it the

“American academy of death and destruction,” and there were some wary

Americans who concurred. Amid crew cuts, pipes, and practical jokes, a strange

zeitgeist pervaded: the worship of the rational and the quantified, a geopolitical

obsession, and a “weirdly compelling mix of Olympian detachment, paranoia,

and megalomania.” Game theory was central. The head of the mathematics

division, John Williams, wanted the very best men at his disposal. John von

Neumann was at the top of his list.