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56. George Price letter to Al Somit, February 1, 1953, GPP.
57. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War (London: Penguin, 2005).
58. Jean and Fairfield Hoban telegram to George Price, September 30, 1953, GPP;
Julia Price letter to Alice Avery Price, December 10, 1953, GPP; Alice Avery
Price letter to George Price, September 22, 1953, GPP.
CHAPTER 5: FRIENDLY STARFISH, SELFISH GAMES
1. Clay Blair, Jr., “Passing of a Great Mind,” Life, February 25, 1957, 89–90,
quote on 89.
2. William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory,
and the Puzzle of the Bomb (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), 5; Blaer, “Passing
of a Great Mind.”
3. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776; reprint edited by Edwin Cannan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1976).
4. Veblen first used the term “neoclassical” in “Preconceptions of Economic
Science,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 13 (January 1899).
5. Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Two Lives: The Story of Wesley Clair Mitchell and
Myself (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953), 86; Thorstein Veblen, The Theory
of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899; reprint, New York:
Macmillan, 1953) and “The Limitations of Marginal Utility,” Journal of Political
Economy 17 (November 1909), 622, 624. On Veblen see Rick Tilman, Thorstein
Veblen and His Critics, 1891–1963 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
6. C. Wright Mills of Columbia University wrote this in his introduction to
Veblen’s own The Theory of the Leisure Class, ix.
7. Frank Knight, “The Newer Economics and the Control of Economic Activity,”
Journal of Political Economy (August 1932), 458; Chicago Tribune, May 28,
1972; Frank Knight, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1921).
8. Frank Knight, The Economic Organization (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1933).
9. W. C. Allee, “Evolution of a Mechanist,” circa 1915, 9–11, quoted in Gregg
Mitman, The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social
Thought, 1900–1950 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 52. Mitman’s
book is the best study of Allee and Chicago ecology.
10. Karl Patterson Schmidt, “Warder Clyde Allee,” Biographical Memoirs,
National Academy of Sciences USA 30 (1957), 3–40; Alfred E. Emerson and
Thomas Park, “Warder Clyde Allee: Ecologist and Ethologist,” Science 121 (May
13, 1955), 686–87; David W. Blight, Passages to Freedom: The Underground
Railroad in History and Memory (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2002);
on Earlham see Thomas Hamm, “A Brief History of Earlham College,” at the
school’s Web site: www.earlham.edu/EC_history.html.
11. Warder Clyde Allee, “An Experimental Analysis of the Relation Between
Physiological States and Rheotaxis in Isopoda,” Journal of Experimental Zoology
13 (1912), 270–344; Mitman, The State of Nature, 53.
12. Springfield News-Record, February 9, 1917, quoted in Mitman, The State of
Nature, 56.
13. See ibid., 58–62.
14. Peter Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and
Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 10; Oren Harman,
“On the Power of Ideas,” Minerva 45 (2007), 175–189. Many American
biologists connected German militarism to Darwinism. See Mitman, The State of
Nature, 220, n36.
15. Quotes from Mitman, The State of Nature, 60.
16. On Spencer see Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of
Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987), 234–330.
17. Blair, “Passing of a Great Mind.”
18. Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 22, 21, 24. See also Stanislaw Ulam, “John
von Neumann, 1903–1957,” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 64,
no. 3 (May 1958), 1–49.
19. John von Neumann, “Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftspiele,” Mathematische
Annalen 100 (1928), 295–320. See Robert J. Leonard, “From Parlor Games to
Social Science: Von Neumann, Morgenstern and the Creation of Game Theory,
1928–1944,” Journal of Economic Literature 33 (1995), 730–61.
20. John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
(London: Macmillan 2007; 1936), 3.
21. Hyman Minsky, John Maynard Keynes (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1975); GeoffTily, Keynes’s General Theory, the Rate of Interest and
“Keynesian” Economics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
22. Don Patinkin, Essay On and In the Chicago Tradition (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1981), 299; Leonard Silk, The Economists (New York: Basic
Books, 1976), 46; Henry Simons, A Positive Program for Laissez-Faire: Some
Proposals for a Liberal Economic Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1934); Craufurd D. Goodwin, “Martin Bronfenbrenner, 1914–1997,” Economic
Journal (November 1998), 1776.
23. Jacob Viner, “Mr. Keynes and the Causes of Unemployment,” Quarterly
Journal of Economics, November 1936; Johan Van Overtveldt, The Chicago
School: How the University of Chicago Assembled the Thinkers Who
Revolutionized Economics and Business (Canada: B2 Books, 2007), 81. Van
Overtveldt provides a thorough overview of the rise of the Chicago School.
24. Edward O. Wilson and Charles D. Michener, “Alfred Edward Emerson,
1896–1976,” Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences USA 53
(1982), 159–77, 162. Emerson’s collection was donated to the American Museum
of Natural History in New York City.
25. Sewall Wright, “Genetics of Abnormal Growth in the Guinea Pig,” Cold
Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology 2 (1934), 137–47, quote on
139. On Wright see William Provine, Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
26. For an up-to-date, modern appreciation of the idea of the superorganism see
Bert H lldobler and E. O. Wilson, The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance,
and Strangeness of Insect Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).
27. See William Morton Wheeler, The Social Insects (New York: Harcourt, Brace
& Co., 1928), and “Animal Societies,” Scientific Monthly 39 (1934), 289–301.
28. Alfred E. Emerson, “Biological Basis of Social Cooperation,” Illinois
Academy of Science Transactions 39 (1946), 12, quoted in Mitman, The State of
Nature, 158.
29. Frank Lillie, “The Department of Biology in Relation to the New
Organization,” Daily Maroon, December 11, 1930; Warder Clyde Allee,
“Science Confirms an Old Faith,” American Friend 35 (1928), 780. Quoted in
Mitman, 52.
30. See Warder Clyde Allee, “Animal Aggregations,” Quarterly Review of
Biology 2 (1927), 367–98, and Animal Aggregations: A Study in General
Sociology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1927).
31. A good description of Allee’s aggregation work appears in Dugatkin, The
Altruism Equation, 41–50.
32. W. C. Allee, “Concerning Biology and Biologists,” quoted in ibid., 57.
33. W. C. Allee, “Reexamination of One Fundamental Doctrine in the Light of
Modern Knowledge,” and “Where Angels Fear to Tread,” quoted in ibid., 48, 56.
34. Oskar Morgenstern, Diary, April–May 1942, quoted in Leonard, “From Parlor
Games to Social Science,” 730.
35. John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic
Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), 2.
36. Van Overveldt, The Chicago School, 215. Many of the professors at the
Chicago Department of Economics did not endorse the research methods used at
the Cowles Commission. All, however, considered von Neumann a genius.
37. Actually, game theory as Neumann and Morgenstern had defined it was
probably least applicable to economics compared to other fields: Zero-sum games
between two people are negligible in economic situations, whereas cooperative,
many-people games were not strictly solved in the book. That would have to wait
for John Nash.
38. Mitman, The State of Nature, 159.
39. Alfred E. Emerson, “The Biological Basis of Social Cooperation,” Illinois
Academy of Science Transactions 39 (1946), 12, quoted in Mitman, The State of
Nature, 158.
40. George Gaylord Simpson, “The Role of the Individual in Evolution,” Journal
of the Washington Academy of Sciences 31 (1941), 16, quoted in Mitman, The
State of Nature, 165. Simpson’s accusation was directed against the
neurobiologist Ralph Gerard. See Ralph W. Gerard, “Organism, Society and
Science,” Scientific Monthly 50 (1940), 340–50, 530–35.
41. Not that Emerson wasn’t a democrat. His problem was how to hold on to a
biological view of the democratic state while combating the organicism of
fascism. Emerson chose to save organicism by arguing that fascism had misused
it by stamping out individual variation—a crucial component of progressive
integration of the group.
42. Emerson, “The Biological Basis of Social Cooperation,” 17–18, quoted in
Mitman, A State of Nature, 160.
43. For a recent biography see Lanny Ebenstein, Milton Friedman (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
44. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1962; reprint, 2002), xi.
45. This was the title of a book by the Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek, a
friend of Friedman’s, and, beginning in 1950, a colleague at Chicago. See
Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom. Fiftieth Anniversary Edition (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994).
46. Quoted in Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 26.
47. Ibid., 2.
48. Mitman, A State of Nature, 109.
49. Allee worked on the endocrinology of the pecking order. See W. C. Allee, N.
E. Collias, and Catherine Z. Lutherman, “Modification of the Social Order in
Flocks of Hens by the Injection of Testosterone Proprionate,” Physiological
Zoology 12 (1939), 412–40; W. C. Allee and N. E. Collias, “The Effect of
Estradiol on the Social Organization of Flocks of Hens,” Endocrinology 27
(1940), 87–94; W. C. Allee, N. E. Collias, and Elizabeth Beeman, “The Effect of
Thyroxin on the Social Order in Flocks of Hens,” Endocrinology 27 (1940),
827–35; Benson Ginsburg and W. C. Allee, “Some Effects of Conditioning on
Social Dominance and Subordination in Inbred Strains of Mice,” Physiological
Zoology 15 (1942), 485–506.
50. A. M. Guhl and W. C. Allee, “Some Measurable Effects of Social
Organization in Flocks of Hens,” Physiological Zoology 17 (1944), 320–47.
51. Warder Clyde Allee, “Biology and International Relations,” New Republic
112 (1945), 816.
52. Mitman, A State of Nature, 184.
53. Warder Clyde Allee, The Social Life of Animals (New York: W. W. Norton,
1938); “Where Angels Fear to Tread: A Contribution from General Sociology to
Human Ethics,” Science 97 (1943), 517–25; Mitman, A State of Nature, 178–201.
54. Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 83–99.
55. Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998),
104–14, quote on 104
56. In fact, the earliest use of game theory in World War II by the United States
involved designing antisubmarine tactics against the Germans. Mathematicians at
the Anti-Submarine Warfare Operation Evaluation Group were said to carry
around copies of Neumann’s 1928 paper on poker.
57. Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 68.
58. Ibid., 118.
59. John Nash’s “Equilibrium Points in N-Person Games,” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences USA 36 (1950), 48–49, had been the original spur
to the prisoner’s dilemma, since Nash’s optimal solutions were not satisfied in it.
Flood and Dresher themselves now believe that the prisoner’s dilemma will never
be “solved,” and nearly all game theorists agree. On Nash’s incredible story see
Nasar, A Beautiful Mind.
60. Dugatkin, The Altruism Equation, 59. Allee was, however, a highly respected
scientist and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1951.
61. Ibid., 60.
62. Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 191.
63. Even former RANDers Luce and Raiffa concluded in 1957 that most social
scientists were disillusioned with game theory. R. Duncan Luce and Howard
Raiffa, Games and Decisions (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1957).
64. Poundstone, 193–94; George Orwell, “As I Please,” Tribune, 30 June, 1944,
in George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters: Volume 3
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 20.8
CHAPTER 6: HUSTLING
1. “Results of Psychical Research,” New York Times, September 4, 1892.
2. Seymour Mauskopf, ed., The Reception of Unconventional Science by the
Scientific Community (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979); Joseph Rhine letters
to George Price, April 13, 1971, and May 18, 1972, GPP.
3. Seymour Mauskopf and Michael R. McVaugh, The Elusive Science: Origins of
Experimental Psychical Research, 1915–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,
1980).
4. Samuel George Soal, “Fresh Light on Card Guessing,” Proceedings of the
Society for Psychical Research 46 (1940), 152; Joseph B. Rhine, New Frontiers of
the Mind (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937).
5. Alice Avery Price letters to herself from W. E. Price, April–May 1946, June 25
1950, EPFA.
6. George Price letter to Bob and Marjorie Sheffield, December 1, 1953, GPP;
George Price letter to Henry Noel, February 1, 1953, GPP.
7. George Price, “Science and the Supernatural,” Science 122 (1955), 359–67,
quote on 360; George Price correspondence with Joseph Rhine, February 25 and
March 15, 1941, GPP.
8. Ibid., 367, 363.
9. Aldous Huxley, “Facts and Fetishes,” Esquire, September 1955, 43–44,
115–16, quote on 43; George Price, “Science and the Supernatural,” Science 122
(August 26, 1955), 359–67.
10. Anthony Arthur, Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair (New York: Random
House, 2006), 43; Upton Sinclair letter to George Price, August 5, 1956, GPP.
Einstein had become friendly with Sinclair via correspondence over social issues,
and even attended a séance in his home in California in 1930. When Mrs. Sinclair
challenged his views about telepathy, Einstein’s wife, Elsa, chided her for her
presumption, saying, “You know my husband has the greatest mind in the world.”
Mrs. Sinclair responded: “Yes, I know, but surely he doesn’t know everything.”
Einstein remained amused and wrote the preface out of friendship rather than
belief, a fact that did not disturb Sinclair’s overwhelming pride. See Walter
Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007),
373–74.
11. New York Times, August 27, 1955. A further article in the Times, “Scientists
Debate 6th Sense of Man,” appeared on January 8, 1956; Reverend Norman
Boswell letter to George Price, January 15, 1956, GPP; C. H. Chalmers letter to
George Price, October 28, 1955, and George’s reply, February 2, 1956, GPP; Fern
Irene Clarke letter to George Price, September 5, 1955, and George’s reply,
October 27, 1955, GPP; Lin Cutler letter to George Price, January 13, 1956, GPP.
12. Science 123 (1956), 7–19, quotes on 8, 9, 15, 13, 11.
13. Ibid., 16.
14. George Price, “Where Is the Definitive Argument?” Science 123 (1956),
17–18.
15. Joan Cook, “John Scarne, Gambling Expert,” New York Times, July 9, 1985;
George Price correspondence with Dr. George K. Bennett and Dr. J. Ricardo
Musso, July–December 1956, GPP; George Price letter to Dr. Keith S. Ditman,
November 14, 1964, GPP.
16. Claude Shannon letter to George Price, January 31, 1955, GPP. Scarne later
became the technical adviser on the motion picture The Sting and his hands
doubled for Paul Newman’s during the deck-switching scenes. See John Scarne,
The Odds Against Me (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966).
17. George Price letter to Al Somit, October 23, 1955, GPP.
18. Gaddis, The Cold War, 163, 123.
19. George Price, “Does Poverty Really Lead to Communism: Outline,” circa
1953, GPP.
20. George R. Price, “Altman’s Theory of Economic Cycles,” Science 117
(1953), 335–36, quotes on 336; George T. Altman, “Cycles in Economics in
Nature,” Science 115 (1952), 51.
21. George R. Price, “How to Speed Up Invention,” Fortune, November 1956,
150–53 and 218–28, quote on 223.
22. Ibid., 228; George Price letter to Dr. Gilfillan, July 1, 1972, GPP.
23. George R. Price, “Arguing the Case for Being Panicky,” Life, November 18,
1957, 125–28, quotes on 125.
24. Ibid., 127, 128.
25. Hubert Humphrey letter to George Price, January 29, 1957, GPP; “Scientist’s
Answer to Lagging Research: A Machine That Will Help Invent Machines” and
“Researcher Devotes His Life to Science,” Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, January
20, 1957; George Price letters to Martin Kessler, October 2 and 29, 1955, GPP;
George Price letter to Al Somit, March 8, 1956, GPP.
26. “Emanuel Piore, 91, Leader and Researcher at IBM,” New York Times, May
12, 2000.
27. George Price letter to E. R. Piore, August 12, 1957, GPP; George Price letter
to Dr. Gilfillan, July 1, 1972, GPP.
28. Interviews with Kathleen Price, April 12 and 13, 2008.
29. Correspondence between George Price and the Law Offices of William R.
Lieberman, July 25, 1957, and September 28, 1957, the British Library George
Price Collection (BLGPC), KPX1_2.3 and KPX1_7.5.
CHAPTER 7: SOLUTIONS
1. Kohn, A Reason for Everything, 227.
2. John Maynard Smith, “In Haldane’s Footsteps,” in Leaders in the Study of
Animal Behavior, ed. Donald A. Dewsbury (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University
Press), 347–54, quote on 348.
3. Quoted in Kohn, A Reason for Everything, 212.
4. Ibid., 211.
5. Vero C. Wynne-Edwards, “Backstage and Upstage with ‘Animal Dispersion,’”
in Leaders in the Study of Animal Behavior, 487–512, quotes on 488, 489.
6. Charles Elton, “Periodic Fluctuations in the Numbers of Animals: Their Causes
and Effects,” British Journal of Experimental Biology 2 (1924), 119–63.
7. Alexander M. Carr-Saunders, The Population Problem: A Study in Human
Evolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922).
8. Wynne-Edwards’s descriptions of nature in the Arctic are very similar to those
of Kropotkin in Mutual Aid: “Except perhaps among carnivorous predators,
competition between individuals for space and nourishment seems commonly to
be reduced to a low level among members of the Arctic flora and fauna; they live
somewhat like weeds, the secret of whose success lies in their ability to exploit
transient conditions while they last, in the absence of serious competition. In the
Arctic the struggle for existence is overwhelmingly against the physical world,
now sufficiently benign, now below the threshold for successful reproduction,
and now so violent that life is swept away, after which recolonization alone can
restore it.” V. C. Wynne-Edwards, “Zoology of the Baird Expedition,” The Auk
69, no. 4 (1952), 353–91, quote on 384.
9. V. C. Wynne-Edwards, “Intermittent Breeding of the Fulmar (Fulmarus
glacialis) with Some General Observations on Non-Breeding in Sea-Birds,”
Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London A109 (1939), 127–32.
10. There are a number of known density-dependent reproduction-control
mechanisms, such as reducing the rate of ovulation via a change in hormone
output, or resorption of the embryos in the uterus as a result of stress.
Wynne-Edwards, however, was talking about voluntary restraint accomplished
via ritualized convention, as in territoriality displays, migration, and abstention.
11. This had been the original insight of Georgii Gause, which he called the
“principle of competitive exclusion.” See Sharon E. Kingsland, Modeling Nature:
Episodes in the History of Population Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1985), 146–62.
12. David L. Lack, The Natural Regulation of Animal Numbers (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1954). See also Lack, “My Life as an Amateur Ornithologist,”
Ibis 115 (1973), 421–31, The Life of the Robin (London: Witherby, 1943), Swifts
in a Tower (London, Methuen, 1956), and Darwin’s Finches: An Essay on the
General Biological Theory of Evolution (London: Methuen, 1973).
13. V. C. Wynne-Edwards, Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behavior
(Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962), 20. The fishing analogy first appeared in V.
C. Wynne-Edwards, “The Control of Population Density Through Social
Behaviour: A Hypothesis,” Ibis 101 (1959), 436–41, quote on 437.
14. Wynne-Edwards called the kind of behavior necessary for such convention
“epideictic.” His main study of such behavior was on the red grouse, Lagopus
lagopus scotica, in the vicinity of Aberdeen. Olavi Kalela, too, developed this
idea. See his “ ber die Funktion der Mandibeln bei den Soldaten von
Neocapritermes opacus (Hagen),” Zoologischer Anzeiger 152 (1954), 228–34.
15. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 139, emphasis added.
16. Quoted in Kohn, A Reason for Everything, 227. For a study of
Wynne-Edwards’ place in the history of the debate on group selections see Mark
Borrello, Evolutionary Restraints: The Contentious History of Group Selection
Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
17. Ibid., 224.
18. David Lack, Population Studies of Birds (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1966); Charles Elton, “Self-Regulation of Animal Populations,” Nature 197
(1963), 634.
19. V. C. Wynne-Edwards, “Population Control in Animals,” Scientific American
211 (1964), 68–74.
20. “The Nature of Social Life,” Times Literary Supplement, December, 14, 1962,
967. More reviews are discussed in Borrello, Evolutionary Restraints. I thank
Mark Borrello kindly for sharing with me a prepublication version of his
manuscript.
21. David Cort, “The Glossy Rats: A Review of Animal Dispersion in Relation to
Social Behavior,” The Nation, November 16, 1963, 326–29, quote on 327.
Wynne-Edwards himself often made the comparison to man.
22. August Weismann, Ueber die Dauer des Lebens [On the Duration of Life]
(Jena, 1882); Ueber Leben und Tod [On Life and Death] (Jena, 1884). Both
appear in English in Weismann, On Heredity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891).
23. See John Maynard Smith, “The Causes of Ageing,” in Review Lectures on
Senescence, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 157 (1962), 115–27.
Peter Medawar and George C. Williams had already been thinking along these
“pleiotropic” lines. See Medawar, An Unsolved Problem of Biology (London:
H.K. Lewis, 1952), and Williams, “Pleiotropy, Natural Selection, and the
Evolution of Senescence,” Evolution 11 (1957), 398–411.
24. This formulation belongs to Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1976; reprint, 1989), 175.
25. The haplodiploid hypothesis turned out to be flawed: many haplodiploid
species have not evolved eusociality, whereas other, diplodiploid species have.
Still, the “spirit” of the hypothesis survived in the notion that there is genetic
conflict between sisters’ interest in producing more female reproductives than
males versus the queen’s interest in an equal investment in the sexes. See R. L.
Trivers and H. Hare, “Haplodiploidy and the Evolution of the Social Insects,”
Science 91 (1976), 249–63, and more recently, N. J. Mehdiabadi, H. K. Reeve,
and U. G. Mueller, “Queens Versus Workers: Sex Ration Conflict in Eusocial
Hymenoptera,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 18, no. 2 (2003), 88–93. For a
definitive presentation of current knowledge on social insects see Bert H
lldobler and E. O. Wilson, The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and
Strangeness of Insect Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).
26. For a full-length biography of Hamilton see Ullica Segerstr le, Nature’s
Oracle: A Life of W. D. Hamilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). There
are many shorter appreciations of Hamilton’s life and science. See Alan Grafen,
“William Donald Hamilton, 1936–2000,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of
the Royal Society 50 (2004), 109–32.
27. This was the writer Alisdair Gray’s remark, quoted in Kohn, A Reason for
Everything, 259; 260; interview with Janet Hamilton (Bill’s sister), October 24,
2007.
28. “I realized that I had little talent in mathematics and even less training for it,”
he later wrote, “so that my efforts to teach myself what was necessary to
understand even the merely standard theoretical population genetics of the day
were tedious in the extreme.”
29. On the jacket of the 1999 edition of Fisher’s book.
30. W. D. Hamilton, Narrow Roads of Gene Land, Volume 1: Evolution of Social
Behavior (Oxford: Spektrum, 1996), 21; the quote on 22 is from Vincent
Wiggles-worth, The Life of Insects (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966).
31. Letters to Mary quoted in Kohn, A Reason for Everything, 265, 266.
32. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, facsimile of the first edition with an
introduction by Ernst Mayr (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 189.