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27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
It's Not Easy, But It Can Be Rewarding Reading, July 30, 2010
This review is from: The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness (Hardcover)
In "The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness," a history of science, particularly the science of evolution, professor and author Oren Harman combines an intellectual history of the search for the origins of altruism with the disturbing story of George Price, the brilliant and eccentric American genius whose insights into the evolution of groups redefined how scientists understand the origins of social behaviors. In common with many of the colorful characters that took a stab at Charles Darwin's great mystery, George Price was an outsider, an unusual and radical character; something about the problem tended to attract minds at the extreme. But if attempts to crack the enigma involve grand histories--Victorian liberalism and Russian anarchism, interwar fascism, Nazi heresies, Vietnam demonstrations, and the dramatic growth of cutting-edge neurogenetics and brain imaging--the story of George Price stands entirely on its own He was a cross between Forrest Gump and the Rain Man, with an uncanny knack of being present while much of the seminal science of the twentieth century was being born. From the Manhattan Project to the telecommunications and computer revolutions at Bell Labs and IBM, he solved problems, then disappeared. And finally, as his family and professional life began to unravel in the late 1960s, he left everything behind and moved to London, Swinging London as it then was, to try his hand at cracking one last great riddle.
Darwin, in his revolutionary On the origin of species by means of natural selection,: Or, The preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life, penned during the Victorian era, had written that natural selection "could never produce in a being anything injurious to itself, for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each." The idea that evolution entails an amoral war of all-against-all runs through the history of evolutionary theory from Herbert Spenser's famous formulation of "survival of the fittest" to Richard Dawkins's more recent "selfish genes." But against this grand vision of "nature red in tooth and claw" stands the indisputable fact of altruism.
Throughout nature, living things pass up advantages and make sacrifices to help fellow members of their species. In ant colonies, drones and queens pass along traits they do not possess to warriors and workers who toil for the greater good of the colony with no hope of passing along their own genes. Sparrows share food with less successful members of their species. Crabs stand guard while other crabs, potential competitors for food and mates, are molting and vulnerable. In a great number of species, mutual aid is the rule rather than the exception. The seemingly impossible act of passing on traits and behaviors that can lead to the rise of selfless behavior was, according to Darwin, "the most serious special difficulty, which my theory has encountered."
Harman, in "The Price," weaves together the centuries-long hunt for an answer to one of evolution's greatest mysteries with the heroism and pathos of a story of a man committed to truth and sacrifice. We follow a cast of characters that includes the Russian evolutionist and anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin; the Scottish economist Adam Smith, who taught that the invisible hand of the market leveled all, and all creatures acted in their own self-interest; the Hungarian mathematical genius and father of game theory, John von Neumann; Thomas Malthus, who preached that inevitably the human race would reproduce itself into numbers that the world's food supply could not sustain; the "greatest Darwinian since Darwin," Bill Hamilton; John Maynard Keynes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, the economists of the Chicago School of Economics (where Price studied): Milton Friedman and several other Nobel Prize winners; the Beatles, and many others. We learn about Konrad Lorenz, whom the ducklings followed, the prisoner's dilemma, and the tragedy of the village common.
The book examines the effort of science to fathom the mystery of genuine kindness. Harman, who has a doctorate from Oxford University, is chair of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Bar Ilan University in Israel. He is the author of The Man Who Invented the Chromosome: A Life of Cyril Darlington, a documentary filmmaker, and a regular contributor to "The New Republic." He lives in Tel Aviv and New York City. In this effort, he combines clear science writing with an empathetic portrait of Price's brilliance, and ultimate downfall. Mind you, I didn't find the book easy reading: I've very little background in mathematics or science, and found the theorems, and the mathematics, difficult to follow. I also found the great parade of names of scientists, economists, psychologists, etc., and all of their backgrounds and lives, difficult to follow: I recognized the better-known names, of course. But I kept slogging through, largely because the author had hooked my interest in Price in the first chapters, and I wanted to know what happened to him. So, easy reading it's not. Rewarding reading, it can be.
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating book - reads like a mystery, July 14, 2010
This review is from: The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness (Hardcover)
If you like Simon Singh Malcolm Gladwell and Sylvia Nasar you must read this book! Harman is able to combine Singh's ability to make complicated science accessible and interesting, Gladwell's skill in telling a captivating story and Nasar's talent for bringing a person back to life - all in one book.
The Price of Altrisum is not simply a biography of a genius, but also a fascinating tale that charts the quest to answer one of the biggest hurdles evolution had to overcome - why would an animal act kindly to another unrelated animal in a world of 'survival of the fittest?'
The biggest appeal for me in the book was that Harman was able not only to tell how masterminds all over the world pondered the problem of kindness (and what they discovered!) but at the same time explains their science and showcases their personality.
I recommended the book to all my friends this year.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
WOW! A masterpiece. Great read. Highly recommended!, August 1, 2010
This review is from: The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness (Hardcover)
It's not often one encounters a book as fascinating and as deeply moving as
this. Where does altruism come from? And can there ever really be pure altruism
apart from disguised self-interest? The life of George Price, the unforgettable
protagonist of The Price of Altruism, is an amazing dramatization of these two
questions, culminating in a heart-wrenching, and brain-rattling ending.
But if this book is a rarity, so is it's author. At once in powerful control of
the science he describes, the lives and psychologies of the scientists he portrays,
and the wider historical and philosophical meanings of mankind's search for the origins
on kidness, Harman is the kind of writer you want to meet after you've read his book,
and hug. I think of The Price of Altruism as a kind of special gift, because it allowed
me to bring different parts of my brain together - the scientific, the historical, the
dramatic, as well as my heart - to bear on a question that I didn't even know meant so
much to me, and to all of us as humans. Harman writes like a poet, and thinks like a
Nobel laureate in science and first class historian all at once. He guides us with a
steady hand all the way from Darwin through the attempts of economists and ecologists,
mathematicians and psychologists, geneticists and brain scientists, to crack the
riddle of altruism - a journey of true majesty and infinite beauty and passion.
Rarely does a topic of such interest find an author of such talents. This is a book I will
cherish and re-read, and it is a book that I will tell all my friends to run to read. A true
work of a master writer on a subject that couldn't be dearer to all of our hearts.
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