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

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generation—in the absence of unlimited resources this was surely the best

solution for all.

But Maynard Smith wasn’t convinced by the logic of the generous-hearted

doddering for the good of the replenishing tribe. In the wild, animals hardly ever

made it to old age; reproduction declines with survival, not necessarily aging,

since the more time lived the greater the chances to die. If natural death rarely

occurs in nature, selection couldn’t have produced the trait of aging. Perhaps this

was a genetic story, then, rather than one of “group selection”: The very same

genes that helped an organism’s fitness when young might with time contribute to

aging, having sneaked past the watchful gaze of selection when they were being

passed on to the next generation.

This kind of “gene’s-eye” view of evolution he had inherited from Haldane,

which was perhaps why the editors of the Journal of Theoretical Biology had sent

him a paper by Bill Hamilton that had left two other reviewers completely baffled

and perplexed.

Thanks to the unusual social life of the Hymenoptera, “The Genetical Evolution

of Social Behaviour” introduced an original idea. For the better part of the century

classical population geneticists had defined “fitness” as the measure of an

organism’s reproductive success: The more off spring an organism sired, the

greater its fitness. A corollary of this definition was that the persistence of any

behavior or gene responsible for it which reduced an organism’s fitness would be

difficult to explain: in time, as was her mandate, natural selection should see to its

demise. But Hamilton now showed that if fitness were redefined to include the

progeny of relatives rather than just one’s own, in many cases the Darwinian

difficulty of explaining the evolution of altruistic behavior would simply

disappear. The key was adopting a “gene’s eye” point of view, and the

Hymenoptera showed precisely why.

In the ancient order—comprising sawflies, wasps, bees, and ants—female

workers are more closely related to their sisters than to their offspring due to a

genetic quirk in their sex-determining heredity called “haplodiploidy.” All

females are born of eggs fertilized by sperm and are diploid (meaning that they

possess a full compliment of chromosomes from both their mother and father),

whereas all males are born of unfertilized eggs and are haploid (meaning that they

have no father but rather only a single set of chromosomes from their mother).

Since female sister workers share all their father’s genes and half their mother’s,

their coefficient of relationship is r = 0.75, whereas since they pass only half their

genes on to the next generation the relationship to their off spring is r = 0.5.

Brothers and sisters, on the other hand, only share one common ancestor, their

mother, and are therefore only half as related as normal siblings, with r = 0.25.

The implications were strangely illuminating. Lazy male drones were not moral

slackers but genetic opportunists: They spent their time seeking to mate rather

than work since their relatedness to off spring would be double their relatedness to

any sisters they might oblige. Female workers, too, were shrewd genetic

calculators. Neither shirkers of parenthood nor mindless toilers, farming the

queen as a “sister-producing machine”

served their interests more generously

than did siring their own brood. Everything depended on perspective: From the

point of view of the gene trying to make its way into the next generation, it made

absolutely no difference in whose body it was being carried. In one stroke, a

century after Darwin, “inclusive fitness” unveiled the mystery of the ants.

But Hamilton didn’t stop there; the Hymenoptera, after all, were just an

illustration. Trudging through pages of algebra he had come up with an elegant

equation. It sounded almost economic: Every altruistic act—such as a rabbit

thumping its legs to warn its friend of the presence of a predator, or a howler

monkey doing the same with its call—would entail both a fitness cost to the

altruist (the chance that he might attract the predator himself), and a fitness benefit

to the receiver (the chance to live another day and produce more offspring). What

Hamilton showed was that, for every social situation, if the benefit (B), devalued

by the relatedness between the two (r), was greater than the cost (C), genes

responsible for altruistic behavior could evolve. The greater the relatedness the

greater chance for altruism. With the help of the mathematics of genes, rB > C

formalized what Darwin and Huxley and Fisher and Haldane had all intuited:

altruism was a family affair.

Boom!

Thrown to the ground, he took a moment to notice the blood soaking his shirt

below the chest and oozing from his mangled hand. There was sawdust, and

smoke, and the unmistakable bittersweet taste of gunpowder. He could hardly see

through the haze and was growing woozy.

William Donald Hamilton was born in the summer of 1936 on a small island in

Egypt’s Nile to Bettina, a physician, and her husband, Archibald, a military

engineer, both of them New Zealanders. After they discovered that army life was

neither their inclination nor priority, they’d settled in a cottage on Badgers Mount,

at the rural edge of the North Downs, County Kent, England. Bettina quit

medicine to raise a family—there was his sister Mary and four more children on

their way, and Archibald set up a bridge design business, gaining his growing

family a steady income from the prefab steel Callender-Hamilton used by army

tanks to gallop across ravines in World War II.

Archibald had taken away the rusty tins filled with explosive powder Bill

unearthed in a rabbit burrow a few days earlier and stashed them in a shed. But it

was too little to stave off his son’s curiosity. Now, just as he was clamping a

powder-filled brass cartridge with a vise, it blew up. With his last ounces of

strength, he dragged himself into the house and collapsed on the kitchen floor. He

was twelve years old. There was shrapnel in his lungs, and the tips of three fingers

were missing. He would live. Risky business was a Hamilton family trait.

“Oaklea,” named after Archibald’s old New Zealand dwelling, was a cramped

home whose inhabitants were tinkering and practical, and “as far as possible, a

self-supporting republic.” You wouldn’t find a plumber invited, nor a carpenter, a

welder, or an electrician. Nor, for that matter, could you find a proper room; Bill

usually slept on an army cot in the corner of the dining room, or, when the frosty

winters gave way to the cool evening breezes of spring, in one of the many tool

sheds surrounding the cottage. In a dry creek or beneath a large piece of birch bark

or in a cozy burrow would do; sometimes he’d forget to come home at night from

his lost-to-the-world natural explorations. Walking barefoot and oblivious down

woodland paths “chasing clouded yellow butterflies through fields of red clover,”

Bill was happiest among plants and insects. The Hamiltons were fiercely

independent, highly spiritual, unsentimental people. Bettina had a keen interest in

natural history, and clearly she’d passed it on to her son.

But young Bill had inherited his father’s aptitude for math, too, even if he thought

he was no good at it.

When he arrived at Cambridge he decided to read Genetics,

the better to combine the two, but not before he’d requested the Origin of Species

as a school prize.

He was following in Fisher’s footsteps. Soon, accompanied by awe and

trepidation, he discovered Fisher himself, white haired in carpet slippers in his

room at Saint John’s. The meeting between the two never developed into a

relationship, however; Fisher’s mind, it seemed, was by this time somewhere else.

Hamilton’s encounter with The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, on the

other hand, had been positively transformative. “This is a book,” he later wrote, “I

weighed as of equal importance to the entire rest of my undergraduate Cambridge

BA course.”

It was also a book not taught at Cambridge, where one of his

professors representatively acknowledged Fisher’s importance as a statistician

but wondered out loud whether he had any qualifications in biology. In zoology, it

seemed, the “good of the species” had conquered everything, another professor’s

book starting: “Insects do not live for themselves alone. Their lives are devoted to

the survival of the species whose representatives they are…,” and so on. Fisher’s

emphasis on natural selection always working at the level of the individual was

ignored. Even natural selection itself was scarcely respected anymore at

Cambridge.

And so Bill Hamilton did what he had always done as a boy in the woodlands:

strike his own path. To his sister Mary he admitted that Fisher’s mathematical

reasoning was “rather beyond me,” but he plugged away nonetheless, spending

months in solitude on each chapter. The eugenic bits on civilizations, especially,

had snagged him. “I now know why they decline, and how to stop them,” he wrote

to Mary. Cultural progress, he had suckled from the bosom of his hero, depended

on natural selection.

A convert to evolution by natural selection working to maximize individual

fitness, he’d need to tackle the kind of behavior Darwin himself said would

annihilate his theory completely if even one instance of it could be convincingly

documented.

He had read Fisher on butterfly distastefulness and Haldane on

drowning cousins, and yet, he’d later remember, “one reads and forgets.”

After

all, however comprehensive the two giants’ treatments of evolution, they had

devoted only a few paragraphs to the problem, and surprisingly not attempted a

comprehensive mathematical model. Besides, treating it as a phenomenon related

to Military Cross winning, as both had tended to do, seemed to confuse things.

Still, clearly, Hamilton thought, the genetics of behavior was a subject relevant to

animal and plant as well as man. If the geneticists at Cambridge didn’t see the

point, or the social anthropologists what connection it had with genetics, he would

go elsewhere to pursue his puzzles. Just twenty-two, a gentle and shy loner with a

shock of thick hair, workman’s hands, massive jaw, and the general appearance of

a Neanderthal, Bill Hamilton had found his problem: the evolution of altruism.

Already he knew: Feelings for family are not the same as for strangers. As the

badgers for whom the hill of his childhood was named made famous, protecting

kin was a risky but prevalent affair. Why should this be so? Pondering the

question, he put in an application to become a teacher, just as Fisher had done

before him. But his genetics degree, the good people at the School of Education at

Moray House teachers’ training program in Edinburgh informed him, would only

qualify him for junior high. Cuddling the snub, he thought about becoming a

carpenter.

Finally he walked into the office of Lionel Penrose, Galton Chair of Genetics at

University College London. Haldane was by now working at the Indian Statistical

Institute and living in an ivory tower in Orissa. No, Penrose intoned coldly to Bill,

he didn’t see the connection between a moral trait like altruism and genetics.

Recently he’d changed the name of the Annals of Eugenics to the Annals of

Human Genetics, and would have no talk of genes for human behavior. At best

the genetic evolution of altruism was a waste of time; more to the point, it was

pernicious. Morphology was one thing, but hadn’t the Third Reich been

enough?

Whether Penrose really believed this, Hamilton was not certain. The times had

seen a strong environmentalist backlash, but to him it all seemed maudlinly

political. He had a sneaking suspicion that, as in the old Punch cartoon, Penrose

was trapped and wishing it all to go away: “Have you heard that Mr Darwin says

that we are all descendant from the ape?” one shocked Victorian lady asks the

other. “Oh, my dear—that surely cannot be true!…But, if it should be true, let us

pray that at least it will not become generally known!”

To contemplate the biology of character was to think “the socially unthinkable”

after Mein Kampf and the Final Solution it was positively verboten. At stake,

rather than religion in Darwin’s day, was the egalitarian premise of democracy,

not to mention the delicate politics of race. Penrose acknowledged a Cambridge

genetics degree, and offered Hamilton work on classical fly genetics; for the

evolution of altruism he’d need to go elsewhere. Luckily, unlike Penrose,

Professor Norman Carrier of the Department of Human Demography at LSE

seemed “quite unaware of even a possibility that I might be a sinister new sucker

budding from the roots of the recently felled tree of Fascism, a shoot that was

once again so daring and absurd as to juxtapose words such as ‘gene’ and

‘behaviour’ into single sentences.” The friendly Carrier didn’t quite grasp the

project but was encouraging and helped Bill secure a studentship.

He was deeply lonely. Enrolled as a doctoral student in two separate departments

and institutions, he spent hardly any time at either. With no office space and

virtually no one in the corridors or libraries knowing his name, he did most of his

work alone in his bed-sit in Chiswick, or, when the sun came out and—struggling

to keep the pages from blowing away in the wind—on a bench at Kew. At UCL

Penrose projected a “kind of gloomy avoidance,” so the friendly but rather absent

Professor Cedric Smith was assigned as his formal supervisor. At LSE Carrier

was replaced by the mathematically apt but biologically innocent John Hajnal.

Bill was on his own, walking the narrow bridge of obscurity. Unable to

distinguish the conviction that he had seen something that others had not seen

from the suspicion that he was nothing but a crank, Hamilton teetered on the brink

of despair.

Some nights he’d stop on a bench at Waterloo Station, back from Holborn Public

and the Senate House—the late libraries—not wanting to return to his depressing

quarters. There, at least, the waiting passengers in the main hall gave him some

comfort. Scribbling out his mathematical model with pencil in notebooks, Bill felt

less alone.

Partly to save money, partly for exercise, and partly to conjure somehow, “below

the bricks and mortar around me, the marshy fields that had once been there, the

streams dividing them, and the heaths behind—to seek, in short, elemental forces

underlying the city,” he walked London through and through:

Even a lonely child on the street did not tug my heart as hard as a bracken fern

when I saw it, for example, in the valley of the stream once called the Fleet…. I

recall also the soul-piercing yellow from the flat, star-like flowers of a ragwort.

What plant was this, daring to flower under such hostile cliffs, where was it from?

Was it a growth form of the more crinkled and robust plant I knew so well on the

Kentish fields, there crawled upon and stripped by the stripy caterpillars of the

cinnabar moth? But if the leaves in London might be laxer and greener because of

a lack of light or to an excess of lead in these wells, why would the flower be

larger?…I simply imagined that, like me, the plants were longing to be away from

these dark concrete canyons, back in their own countryside. Fixed in their cracks,

as I thought, what else was there for them but to signal desperately with their

bright petals to the rare and equally lost London bees crossing (again like me) the

chasm of the Farringdon Road? Was it through such petals and then such an

insect’s aid that they hoped to create the seeds which an autumn storm could

carry away?

Bill Hamilton felt an intimacy with the outdoors that blurred the boundaries

between himself and nature. Those who knew him couldn’t help feeling that this

gentle giant was more comfortable in the presence of spiders than humans.

And then, from beneath the despair and reams of equation-filled notebooks, rB >

C appeared. Others thought the idea behind it a “solvent of a vital societal glue,”

but imagining himself a gene in the body of a toiling ant, Hamilton welcomed it as

a “love child.” Finally, after Darwin and Fisher and Haldane, not to mention

Penrose, he had cracked, in his painful solitude, the mystery of kindness to

others.

The paper sent to him by the Journal of Theoretical Biology was brimming with

mathematical equations and natural history. The name Hamilton sounded familiar

from UCL, but he remembered it rather vaguely.

Not following the math too

closely—the notation was unconventional and the typesetting

confusing—Maynard Smith recommended splitting it in two. It was too long and

needed revisions. Still, unlike the other two reviewers who hadn’t understood it,

he was impressed by Hamilton’s insight. “Of course, why didn’t I think of that!”

he exclaimed to himself, just as T. H. Huxley had done when encountering

Darwin.

Since he was presently writing a review of Wynne-Edwards’s book, he

wanted to distinguish it from group selection. After all, a family is a kind of

group, and “inclusive fitness” might be interpreted as just a form of group

selection. A better term was needed.

Meeting with Lack and a few of his colleagues at Oxford to discuss the annoying

excitement of many biologists over Animal Dispersion, Maynard Smith hit the

jackpot.

In “Kin Selection and Group Selection,” published in Nature, he

proposed a combined verbal and mathematical model showing that the conditions

necessary for group selection to work were so stringent that one would be hard

pressed to find them in nature.

A major obstacle was invasion: If amid a

population of birds exercising population control suddenly appeared a bird who

didn’t, little could stop it from procreating. Assuming its antisocial nature—since

genetic—is passed on to off spring, before long the entire population would be

comprised of self-seekers.

No, group selection was not the way social behavior evolved, the “greater good”

nothing but a hopeful, unworkable illusion. Kin selection, on the other hand, was

a viable evolutionary mechanism.

Besides ants and monkeys and thumping rabbits there were moths. The theory

predicted that camouflaged (cryptic) and brightly colored (aposematic) species

should act differently immediately after siring kin. If caught by a bird, a cryptic

mother would unwittingly be helping the bird learn the moth’s disguise, thereby

making the bird more successful in catching the now exposed younglings. An

aposematic mother in a bird’s beak, on the other hand, would only be doing a

service to her kin: Since her colors are true indicators of a noxious toxin, the bird

will have learned to stay away from similar-looking progeny. It made sense, on

the “gene’s-eye-view” logic of inclusive fitness, that postreproductive cryptics

should die much faster than postreproductive aposematics. Hamilton was

delighted when he learned from the lepidopterist A. D. Blest that postreproductive

cryptics have significantly shorter life spans, but only when they are surrounded

by kin. The greater good was a fiction. And happily, more natural examples of his

theoretical predictions kept rolling in.

Hamilton wasn’t a crank, then, after all, hallelujah!—though he’d convinced

nobody except himself. It was 1963, and his Leverhulme studentship was ending.

He had yet to publish a word. Eager to show something for his years of toil, he

sent a three-page account that was rejected by Nature but accepted by American

Naturalist.

The much longer, detailed article he sent to the Journal of

Theoretical Biology would cover all the bases when he got around to addressing

the anonymous reviewer’s comments—the most important of which, he now read,

was to split it in two. Meanwhile, following in the path of Darwin’s codiscoverer

Alfred Wallace, he was off to Brazil to study social wasps in the jungle.

Walking nature’s trails, Hamilton was once again where he wanted to be. It would

take nine months to resubmit the corrected manuscript, “The Genetical Evolution

of Social Behavior, Parts I and II.” Oblivious to the world, he did not know that in

that space of time John Maynard Smith, citing only the shorter American

Naturalist article, wrote and published “Kin Selection and Group Selection,”

giving “inclusive fitness” its catchy name. Nor, of course, did he know that

Maynard Smith had been the anonymous reviewer responsible for its delay. When

he did find out, it would ignite in his humble soul a feeling it rarely countenanced.

But this was still far off in the future. “Very probably,” he later wrote of the

present,

the sun of the day that saw my paper going into the post from JTB…would have

seen me weaving my old American jeep between the corrugations, stones, and

potholes of the Belém-Brasilia road…. At midday it would have blazed near

vertically on the top of my head as I stopped at the roadside and collected wasps

from some nest; later at sunset, if still able to pierce the haze, it would have seen

me and my Brazilian companion…slinging our hammocks between low cerrado

trees not far from the stony or sandy piste where occasional lorries still groaned

on into the night. For sure, both that day and that night I was blissfully untroubled

about the finer points of measuring relatedness.

No one hated group selection more than George Williams. A lanky American fish

specialist with the beard-but-no-mustache look of what some described as an

Easter Island statue, he was determined to fight Wynne-Edwards. As a student

he’d heard a talk by Emerson: Death, the Chicago man argued, was an adaptation

for the good of the group. Williams wouldn’t believe it. Organisms dying just to

“get out of the way”? That couldn’t be right. “If this was evolutionary biology,”

he said to himself, “I wanted to do something else—like car insurance.”

Across the Atlantic in Oxford, meanwhile, Lack was doing his damnedest to put

the notion of the “greater good” to rest. There was no reason to assume with

Wynne-Edwards that birds restrain their reproduction to strengthen the group. If a

mother bird produced a smaller clutch of eggs, it wasn’t because she was in

cahoots with all the other mothers to lessen the number of progeny. On the

contrary, if resources were slim that year, it made perfect sense to sire fewer

younglings in order to be able to care properly for those who were born: In a

season of dearth, a mother might feed three goslings to health, whereas if there

were seven all might die of hunger. No, natural selection didn’t fashion

adaptations for the good of the group; always, inexorably, it was “looking out” for

individuals.

It was 1966. Nine years earlier Williams had worked out a model, better than

Wright’s, that revealed the conditions under which group selection might work.

But like Maynard Smith he’d become convinced that while possible theoretically,

it was improbable in nature. Lack was right: If behavior could be explained by

selection working at different levels, there was no reason to choose the higher

level over the simpler one. Walking Occam’s razor, the evolutionist should be

guided by parsimony.

However powerful a tool, though, parsimony was a matter of interpretation; it was

difficult to settle unequivocally whether selection was working at the level of the

individual or the group. What Williams really needed to kill group selection was a

prediction that could generate a natural test. And he found what he was looking

for buried in a paragraph in the pages of The Genetical Theory of Natural

Selection.

Fisher had argued that sex ratios in any species should always evolve to an equal

number of males and females. The reason was simple: A male born into a species

with a female-biased sex ratio is at an advantage, since he has more mating

opportunities than a female. If genes determine sex, then in a population with

more females, the male-making gene will be favored by natural selection.

Eventually the frequency of that gene will reach a point where the sex ratio of the

species is now male-biased, whereupon its alternative, a gene promoting the

production of females, will be favored. The dancing dialectic would ensure a

symmetry of sexes: The wisdom of selection fashions males and females

one-to-one.

Even though he didn’t know it, Fisher was playing a game, just like the ones John

von Neumann loved. Whether a mother should produce a son or a daughter, after

all, depended on what other mothers were doing—the requisite condition for the

application of game theory. But beyond the convergence of economics and

biology, what Williams now saw was that Fisher had done a blessed service:

Figuring out the logic of the symmetry of the sexes, he’d delivered the deathblow

to the notion of the “greater good.”

Here is why: Imagine a mother parrot mating and then flying off alone to a

deserted island in the middle of the sea. Imagine that she lays 10 eggs, half of

which hatch into males, the other half into females, and imagine that her

daughters do the same. What will happen? The population will grow rather

quickly: From 10 in the first generation, it will balloon into 50 in the next (25

females and 25 males), 250 in the generation after that (125 of each sex), and so

on.

But what if the mother parrot lays 10 eggs that hatch into 9 females and just 1

male, and her daughters do the same: How then would the population grow? In the

first generation, as before, there would be 10 parrots (9 females and one male).

But in the next generation there would be 90 (81 females and 9 males) and in the

one after that 810 (729 females and 81 males). Compared with a 1:1 sex ratio, a

female-biased ratio would run much faster. Before long the island would be

teeming with parrots.

But there was a twist. Even though siring more females would benefit the growing

group, it would actually reduce the individual fitness of the mothers who did so.

Imagine two mother parrots arriving on the island: Linda sticking to the 1:1 sex

ratio, Barbara to the 9:1. Together they will produce 20 offspring in the first

generation: 5 + 9 = 14 females added to 5 + 1 = 6 males. When these off spring

mate among one another, while each female continues to lay 10 new eggs, the

average male sires 23 children (140 divided by 6), since he fathers the offspring of

more than 2 females. The results for Linda and Barbara are surprising: After three

generations, Linda, who stuck to the slower 1:1 sex ratio but had more males, will

have 165 grand-offspring whereas Barbara, who went for the 9:1, will have only

113.

When it came to the sex ratio there was a conflict between community and

individual: If the group counts, “altruistic” Barbara is the winner, but if the

individual is selection’s client, “selfish” Linda prevails. Wynne-Edwards had

shown that in times of dearth it is not always to the advantage of the population to

breed as much as possible. But assuming sex ratio was an adaptation, when the

times of dearth were over one would expect a switch to a female-biased sex ratio.

Scouring the literature, Williams saw that this never happened—not in flies, not in

pigs or rabbits, not even in humans. Over time and across all vagaries the 1:1 sex

ratio remained stable—the very prediction that selection working to maximize

individual fitness required.

It was a mortal blow to the doctrine of the “greater good.” Practically overnight,

Adaptation and Natural Selection became a classic and group selection a theory to

stay away from like the plague. Finally “Wynne” had been felled, though, like

Sisyphus, he would keep on fighting his battle. Williams ended with a tip of the

hat to Fisher: Beyond a doubt, fulmars and red grouse notwithstanding, natural

selection produces adaptations optimizing individual fitness. “I am convinced,”

he wrote triumphantly, “that it is the light and the way.”

Back from Brazil, Hamilton had news of his own: In countless species of ants,

thrips, wasps, beetles, and mites there are extraordinary sex ratios, major

departures from Fisher’s pristine one-to-one. Hamilton, unlike Fisher (and even

Williams), would know: He had found them peeling back bark from capirona and

kapok trees, stripping weeds of larvae beneath shallow jungle streams, and

munching on figs with internal surprises. Mellitobia acasta was an example: A

tiny parasitic wasp, its female lays her eggs inside the living pupae of

bumblebees. When the eggs hatch they eat their way out of the pupa, but not

before each female engages in sex with the sole male, their only brother. After all,

it makes sense for their mother to use the confined body of the pupa to lay as many

female eggs as possible and only one male to inseminate them: Once they’ve been

fertilized, they can fly away to lay their own eggs in another poor bumblebee

pupa, while their exhausted brother and lover, the wingless male, wastes away in

the abandoned cocoon.

By now Hamilton had a research position at Imperial College Field Station near

Ascot, an institution eminent in the study of insect ecology. Around its

rotten-wood grounds in Silwood Park, in the asphalt cracks of his cramped

Berkshire home, and on walks in the royal forests around Windsor he discovered

the Western European cousins of his Amazonian friends. Parasitism, he was

learning, could get complicated—and fast: Sometimes two females laid their eggs

in the same caterpillar or pupa, sometimes progeny dispersed and sometimes they

didn’t; sometimes ruthless males, like “maniacal homicides armed with knives,”

fought over amorous sisters to the death. Each situation changed the rules of

fitness entirely. How would a miniature acasta know what precise proportion of

male-to-female eggs to lay?

To figure out himself what the answer should be, Hamilton journeyed into

London many days to use the UCL computer center at Gordon Square. It wasn’t a

pretty affair: Programming in the dinosaur FORTRAN language, which still