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The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness

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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.

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.

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.

Before I read this book, I corresponded with its author, Oren Harman, concerning a short piece of fiction that I had written, which he agreed to read and then praised quite generously. I add that only to indicate that he's a warm man and a hungry mind. His book demonstrates both those qualities, and I recommend The Price of Altruism enthusiastically. It follows the life of George Price closely, but equally important, it places his life in context not only of his times but also of the science of his times. The book is a biography of an idea and of the people who researched and developed the idea of the basis--in nature--of goodness. It incorporates shorter biographies of many of the most influential scientists of the modern period. The Price of Altruism is a remarkable accomplishment; and George Price was a tragic figure in the fundamental, Aristotelian sense of the word tragedy, in that his suffering ought to be cathartic for those who follow him. As is true of so many other examples in contemporary science, his pursuit of an empirical ground of a specific truth, in this case of altruism, led him beyond what is likely possible for humans. I don't know why science led him to his demise, nor what in particular destroyed him, because I suspect that more than simply an idea conspired against him. I'd imagine that George Price destroyed himself for reasons in his mind of which he may not have been aware. Nonetheless, his quest was heroic. About him is a feeling of something spectacular--plainly a genius, long a comfortable member of comfortable society, he ended as a vagrant. If genetics gives us goodness, it gives it to us as a group; whereas George Price appears to have wanted to know goodness as an individual. His quest was knowledge, but the knowledge he sought reality itself denied him. Isn't that the substance of the mythic? How much of our science takes us beyond our limitations--and happiness? From that point of view, George Price reflects profoundly on the lives we're living, and Mr. Harman's book brings him as fully to life as we're going to experience him.

Since Kuhn, the history of science has lost sight of the individual, and is largely told as the history of theories, institutions, or collectives. If, as Kuhn so forcefully taught, it is impossible to reason across the incommensurable divides between successive scientific paradigms, then it becomes impossible to make sense of the work and thinking of the individuals who not only straddled those divides, but were instrumental in creating them. Scientific biographies are held to inevitably lose sight of the broader developments in science, and, for the same reason, studies of those developments are held to invevitably lose sight of the individuals who made them possible. Oren Harman's masterful The Price of Altruism, not only succeeds in doing both - telling the moving and tragic story of George Price's life, while relating the dramatic story of the search for a scientifically viable account of the evolution of altruism - but in doing so exemplifies beautifully how greater the combined sum is of its separate parts.

A gripping tale, extraordinarily well-written, whose historiographical importance far exceeds its two-fold subject matter.

Oren Harman has written a fine biography of my friend (1952 - 1972) George R. Price.
While I cannot comment on "Altruism" - I am a chemist - Oren has revealed a creative
and complex individual and his multiple environments.
At our last dinner George revealed and documented his solution to the riddle of Easter.
He also hinted at being "Chosen", a likely development toward his dedication to the homeless.
There are many lessons in this tale in a book well worth reading.
Recommended.
Ludwig Luft

Harman's The Price of Altruism is an engaging read that explores the personality and life of George Price as he works through his major contributions to the population genetics of altruistic behavior. Nuanced concepts of population genetics are introduced cleverly without unnecessary detail. The inclusion of only a few equations in the text is remarkable: this topic is difficult to explain without equations. Also the personality of Prince is slowly explored without any emotional treatment of this peculiar man who was such a poor husband and father. Instead, Price's behavior is contrasted artfully to his lifelong attempt to explain the basis of altruism.
The only negative feature of the book is the abrupt transitions in topic, especially at the beginning where Harman establishes the historical context for the story. The reader is dropped into a series of short presentations of various people who will be relevant later in the book. Also Harman's wordsmithing requires the reader to stop occasionally to mentally rewrite a difficult sentence to produce a clearer one. Regardless of these minor technical issues, the topic is an extremely interesting one that Harman presents in remarkable detail. He took the task of researching the topic and man very seriously. The result is an exceptional treatment of George Price and an extremely clear presentation of the underpinnings of altruistic behavior.

One of the best books I have read this year. Fine popular science writing--as lucid as Gladwell, but less glib, more satisfying. Harman writes authoritatively about the science and sensitively about Price's life. Most important, he genuinely probes the larger moral questions at stake. What are the implications of a biological theory of kindness? If Harman does not provide a definitive answer, it is just as well. Such questions have only personal answers.

Disclaimer: I know Harman personally. But I would not review this here if I did not genuinely enjoy the book. I will recommend it to friends, family, and colleagues.

Oren Harman is an exceptionally talented writer, an excellent historian, and both of these qualities are on display in this compelling story. Price is not a well known character in the history of evolutionary biology but he ought to be, and Harman's fascinating account places him at the center of the development of evolutionary theory in the 1960s and 70s. The question that motivated Price, and bedeviled Darwin, was how self-sacrificial behavior could arise in a Darwinian world where self-interest apparently ruled. Biologists had struggled with this question since Darwin and the story of the polymathic, quirky and ultimately suicidal George Price and his role in the solution to this question is worthy of Hollywood (don't be surprised to see that development). Harman's treatment of Price is insightful, nuanced and balanced, Price's character is not unblemished, and the story he tells provides insight into how scientific ideas develop and the ways in which they are connected to the lives of their progenitors. Harman examines the psychology and personality of George Price, while simultaneously illuminating the social process that marks the modern scientific endeavor. Anyone interested in the origins of altruism, the evolution of morality, the application of game theory to the evolution of behavior should read this book. It is truly an incredible story.
Disclaimer: I know Oren well and clearly remember the beginning of this project (a discussion at a Pub in Kent in the summer of 2006). Regardless, this is a book that I have recommended to friends, students and colleagues and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

For the first third of the book the narrative shifts focus every couple of pages, cinematically changing scene and moving back and forth among several historical figures, often without clear motivation for the shifts. Some might like this; I found it disconcerting. The later parts of the book, where the focus remains largely on George Price, seem much more coherent.

Throughout, the discussions of theory seem to me sound and insightful. (I once studied some of this material in a graduate course on animal behavior.) The book does a great job of explaining the broader significance of the competing theories, including their supposed political implications.