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

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Ambition: Engineer

Favorite Subject: Mathematics

Hobby: Model Airplanes, Photography

Favorite Magazine: Reader’s Digest

Favorite Comedian: Jack Benny

Favorite Radio Star: Bob Hope

Favorite Actor: Paul Muni, Errol Flynn

Favorite Actress: Hedy Lamarr, Bette Davis

Favorite Orchestra: Glenn Miller, Kay Kyser

Favorite Athlete: Lou Gehrig, Glenn Cunningham

Favorite Author: John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis

Favorite Ball Club: N.Y. Yankees, Brooklyn Dodgers

Favorite Columnist: Jimmy Powers, Walter Winchell

Favorite Morning Newspaper: New York Times, Daily News

Favorite Evening Newspaper: N.Y. Post, N.Y. World-Telegram

Favorite Radio Program: Bob Hope Show, Fred Allen Show

Favorite Motion Picture: “Gone With the Wind”

For his part George hoped to be a “research physicist,” and his yearbook

photograph agreed. Serious and cocky, his gaze was at once both dreamy and

focused, and the paradox fit him perfectly.

Parting from the class, Mr. Bradshaw, the track coach, compared success in life to

the storming of a citadel, reminding everyone that the average boy earned $8,500

fifteen years upon graduating and wishing them luck in life’s “battle.”

The

principal, Sinclair J. Wilson, took a more spiritual approach to education. As the

graduating class and their families settled into their seats at Carnegie Hall on a

warm summer day on June 25, 1940, the Lincolnesque New England headmaster

started with a soft but stern tone, pointing his elongated finger at the hushed

crowd:

In an age which weighs the good in the scales of the profitable, men all too ready

discard ideals and moral principles…. You were ushered into life in a world

which had just lately witnessed the fall of mighty empires. Your early years

opened upon vistas and dreams of material wealth and a world of comfort

unknown to former generations. Peace and plenty seemed about to be assured for

all times. Instantly that secure world crashed. Misery and want beset it all

around. Now fear and suspicion and hatred would join this evil pair to make a

shambles of the garden which you would cultivate…. We lose our horizons

because our vision becomes dimmed through greed or lust or want of charity. And

nations also lose their horizons for the very same reasons. If you would know

where to find the lost horizon, then hold fast to the ideals of your youth and no

matter what the cost, choose to do the right and follow the better way, for

Shangri-La lies wholly within you.

George headed upstate to Walton to the farm he visited in the summers. His home

was a tent in a maple grove, and besides cooking carrots with onions and butter

and discovering new ways to kill flies, there was really not much to do but sleep

and read and go for walks and wander. He had brought twenty books with him,

and in particular enjoyed Bertrand Russell’s Introduction to Mathematical

Philosophy. To members of his old chess team he sent opening gambits,

challenging them to reply: P to K4 ????, N to KB3 ??? It didn’t seem worthwhile

to waste a whole postcard on just one game, so he initiated four separate games in

each letter. His hands were callused from chopping wood, and his back was

“burnt to cinders.” But he had graduated second in a class of 708 and was as free

as a lark now in the woods just behind him.

Meanwhile war was looming on the horizon. Hitler had invaded the Low

Countries in May and with the help of Mussolini had now battered France into

submission. Radio broadcasts were full of news of freighters on the Atlantic being

sunk by U-boats, and crackly transmissions by Edward R. Murrow from a London

under siege.

America had not yet entered the war, but everyone felt that it wouldn’t be long

now. President Roosevelt had just instituted the first peacetime draft in

September, and down at the old Custom House on Battery Park thousands lined

up for their physicals.

Packing up his books and pans and chess set, George left

the grove and traveled to Sea Bright, New Jersey, for a week at the beach with

Alice. Back in New York, he had nine nontransferable tickets to the World’s Fair

at Flushing Meadows, and a few more weeks before college.

The New York World’s Fair invited its visitors to take a look at “the world of

tomorrow” forty-four million had already visited since opening day in the spring

of 1939. Walking among the exhibits, George marveled at a futuristic car-based

city by General Motors, at Bell Labs’ first keyboard-operated speech

synthesizer—the “Voder”—and at an amazing new invention, television. Passing

by the Westinghouse Time Capsule that was not to be opened until A.D. 6939, he

might have thought about the words of Principal Wilson; about marking his

horizon and finding Shangri-La within—“no matter what the cost.” His grades

had won him a coveted Freshman Scholarship to Harvard, even if the partly

bemused, partly awestruck interviewers thought him “an arresting rara avis” and

“a baffling kid” as he described to them his experiments to render glass invisible.

“I am interested in following “Knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost

bound of human thought,” he cuddled Tennyson in his application, and come

September 13, wide-eyed as much as he was determined, set out for Cambridge.

“Might go hay-wire but will never be humdrum,” the Harvard interviewers

concluded. George was on his way.

Ronald A. Fisher (1890–1962)

J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964)

Selections

Katie 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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And so when he clambered into the Prince of Wales’s car after having been

blasted at Aubers it would not be the last time he was wounded. JBS was

cocksure, and entitled. His zeal for battle was so great that he was once pushed

midaction into a ditch by his own gunners, unenthused about the retaliatory fire

his immanent mortar would draw to their battery. Still, his men respected him,

revered him, even. With his imposing frame, premature balding head, massive

forehead and Celtic-warrior-like mustache, he looked like an “alert walrus” in a

skirt. It was alternately comical and bloodcurdling. What other officer in the

trenches was writing a scientific paper with his sister describing one of the

first-ever examples of genetic linkage in mammals? What other officer, as a

confidence-building measure, made smoking compulsory in his bomb-making

workshop (he was selecting out the fainthearted)? And what officer had been

hurriedly called away at the behest of his uncle, the lord chancellor, in order to put

his mind to that of his father’s at a makeshift lab in Saint-Omer, the quicker to

meet the challenge of German gas attacks on Allied forces in Belgium?

Haldane’s men had heard many Oxford stories. How, in 1913, blacklegs had been

hired by the municipality to replace the striking horse-tram drivers. With their

services provided, the drivers’ demands went unmet, and successive attempts to

unharness the stand-in horses were defeated by baton-wielding bobbies. Until

JBS came along, that is. Marching up and down Cornmarket Street, solo, in

solidarity with the workers, chanting the Athanasian Creed and the Latin psalm

Eructavit cor meum, Jack drew a crowd, blocking the blacklegs and allowing the

strikers to set loose their horses: “A scene-stealing cameo role, a feat of memory,

a lengthy canonical Latin quotation, a snook cocked at authority and an Oxonian

irony: with this piece of street theatre, JBS established his modus operandi.”

The

university fined him two guineas. It was “the first case for over three centuries,”

Haldane boasted, “when a man was punished in Oxford for publicly professing

the principles of the Church of England.”

Often dismissive and always demanding, Jack nevertheless had a soft spot for the

underdog, and his men and commanding officers could feel it.

He was also

fiercely loyal: He was wounded twice trying to get back to his brigade from

Saint-Omer after he and Uffer gassed themselves silly with chlorine. Haldane’s

prodigious talents and his love for genetics and the everyman would in due course

propel him to fame. In the meantime he was back in action on the Mesopotamian

front, and injured again in a valiant attempt to gain control over a fire in a bomb

depot at the end of 1916. Presently he was lying bandaged in a military hospital. If

a war hero had to be selected for increased procreation, J. B. S. Haldane would

have won out over anyone.

We can no more accept the principle of arbitrary and casual variation and