The Man who Solved Kindness

George Price is on a mission to prove that human kindness is real. He's seen the latest research suggesting any altruism is ultimately selfish and finds it deeply depressing. George decides to learn the mathematics he needs to prove that research wrong, and throws his career, and life, into the quest for complete kindness.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin a warning before we start. This cautionary tale discusses
death by suicide. If you're suffering emotional distress or you're
having suicidal thoughts, support is available, for example, from the

(00:35):
nine eight to eight Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the US.
Bill Hamilton is on his way to a funeral where
in London it's January nineteen seventy five. Hamilton is an
academic obscure to the general public, but well on his

(00:57):
way to becoming a superstar in his field. That field
is evolution. Hamilton is a brilliant naturalist. Go with him
on a walk and he'll tell you everything there is
to know about every plant, bird, and insect you encounter.
Hamilton is also a highly original thinker. He'll later be

(01:20):
described as the greatest Darwinian since Darwin himself. Bill Hamilton
can't help but feel a twinge of guilt about the
death of the man whose funeral he's going to attend.
Could he have done more to prevent it? In some ways,
George Price had been a close and dear friend. He

(01:40):
had been staying at Hamilton's house just a couple of
weeks before his death. In other ways, though, how well
had anyone known George Price. Really, Price had been a
strange man, a very strange man. Indeed, Hamilton gets to

(02:01):
the funeral service, there are only a handful of mourners.
He recognizes one, a fellow, high powered academic who works
on evolution and game theory. The other mourners are entirely different,
ruddy cheeked, shaggy haired, wearing old and grubby clothes, and

(02:22):
smelling of urine. They look like homeless drunks. That's because
they are homeless drunks. But they're standing quietly in respectful mourning.
Hamilton is moved by their obvious grief. These unfortunate people
must have really loved George Price. What sort of life

(02:47):
do you have to have lived to end up with
a funeral attended by these two types of people, distinguished
academic scientists and homeless drunks. I'm Tim Harford, and you're
listening to cautionary tales. As a young man, Bill Hamilton

(03:30):
was mystified by altruistic behavior, something that incurs a cost
to you and benefits someone else. In human terms. Altruism
doesn't feel like it ought to be much of a mystery.
It's instinctive. It feels good to feed the hungry, give
shelter to the homeless, lend our coat to someone who's cold.

(03:52):
Asking why is liable to make you sound like a psychopath.
The obvious explanation is that deep down in human nature
there must be something good and pure and noble, the
better angels of our nature. We'd like to think so.
But what about other kinds of animal? Here it starts

(04:14):
to get easier to understand why altruism mystified Bill Hamilton.
Take the ground squirrel, for example, a bunch of squirrels
about foraging for nuts when a hawk appears in the sky.
The squirrel who first spots the hawk instinctively squeaks out
to alert the other squirrels, who all scurry for cover.

(04:37):
That alarm call is an act of altruism. The squirrel
who calls out is attracting attention to herself as all
the other squirrels dash for safety, and the hawk looks
to see where the squeak came from. The hawk is
quite likely to come after her. If instead the squirrel
had reacted by quietly finding cover herself, she'd be more

(05:02):
likely to survive while the hawk attacked some other squirrel.
So why doesn't she maybe it's because deep down in
squirrel nature there's something good and pure and noble. Maybe,
but it seems like a stretch. It's even more of

(05:23):
a stretch when you get to another creature that can
be surprisingly altruistic, the wasp. As an evolutionary biologist, Bill
Hamilton worked mostly with mathematics, but he loved to get
out in nature to study wasps or any kind of flying, crawling, buzzing, biting,

(05:43):
stinging things. On field trips in tropical locations, Hamilton was
notorious for seeking out random holes to plunge his hand
into to investigate what exotic insects might be lurking inside.
Every time I turned round, recalled a colleague, he'd be
climbing a tree or wading up a river. During one

(06:05):
expedition to Brazil, Hamilton spotted that an unfamiliar species of
wasp had built a nest in the middle of a
disused termite mound. He wanted to find out more about
this species, so he dug a two meter tunnel to
get into the nest from below. The worker wasps are

(06:25):
extremely fierce, reported Hamilton, and leave there's stings in human
flesh like honeybees. They jet venom, and this often reaches
the eyes. I was incapacitated for two days after my
first observation of this nest. Not but things like this
put him off. By the end of his career, Hamilton

(06:46):
reckoned he must have been stung by at least a
thousand different species of wasp, but all that lay ahead.
As a young student at Cambridge University in the nineteen fifties,
Hamilton wanted to understand in general terms, the altruism of
worker wasps. In some wasp species, they devote their lives

(07:09):
to protecting their queen. Only the queen gets to breed.
The workers never have offspring of their own. In evolutionary terms,
it's quite the sacrifice. Why do the worker wasps do it?
When young Hamilton asked his Cambridge professors that question, the

(07:30):
professors didn't think it was a puzzle at all. They
simply shrugged. Obviously, the wasps are acting for the good
of the species. And the squirrel who raises an alarm
when a predator appears, Oh, she's serving the group of
squirrels to which she belongs, and that must help the
group to compete with other groups. That seemed like woolly

(07:53):
thinking to Bill. He thought natural selection works on individuals,
not groups or species. A squirrel who quietly hid when
she saw a hawk would have a better chance of
surviving than a squirrel who so helplessly raised the alarm.
But expect the genes for quiet hiding to spread. Yet

(08:16):
it was the genes for alarm raising that had won out.
Why Hamilton was determined to solve the mystery, but he
found it hard to get funding for postgraduate research when
nobody else even agreed with him that there was any
mystery to be solved. Hamilton later recalled, at times I

(08:40):
was sure I saw something that others had not seen.
At others I felt equally certain that I must be
a crank. How could it be that respected academics around
me would not see the interest of studying altruism along
my lines unless it were true that my enterprise were
bogus in some way that was obvious to all of
them but not to me. Hamilton managed to find some

(09:05):
funds and an academic to supervise his PhD, a mathematical
geneticist at the Galton Laboratory in London, not that even
his supervisor really got what he was trying to achieve.
At first, most of the time, Hamilton recalled, I was
extremely lonely in the evenings when London's libraries closed for

(09:28):
the night. He couldn't face going back to his dingy
rented room, so he sat on a bench in a
railway station just for the sense of having people around
him while he scribbled equations in his note book. Finally,
Hamilton got his ideas in order, but who might be

(09:50):
willing to publish them? He tried the prestigious journal Nature
and got rejected out of hand. His supervisor reckoned. His
best chance was an obscure new publication, the Journal of
Theoretical Biology. Hamilton sent his manuscript off. George Price had

(10:16):
often seemed on the verge of achieving something brilliant, but
somehow nothing ever quite worked out. Price got a degree
in chemistry from the University of Chicago during the Second
World War and went straight to work on the Manhattan Project,
then Harvard, then Bell Labs. He wrote big think articles

(10:41):
for popular magazines. One was about game theory and the
nuclear threat from the Soviet Union. A publisher was impressed
and offered George in advance to write a book. George
took the money, but somehow never quite managed to finish
the book. Another article imagined a futuristic design machine that

(11:04):
might speed up invention. It looks a lot like what
we've now got, a computer aided design. Was it really
a practical possibility? Yes, said George. He followed up his
magazine piece with a more detailed technical proposal based on
existing IBM computers ahead of. IBM's research department was impressed

(11:28):
and offered George a job, but IBM wouldn't categorically commit
to making George's design machine, so George said no. He'd
patent his idea himself. But he hadn't looked into patenting
before he turned down IBM, and when he did, he

(11:49):
discovered that he couldn't afford a patent lawyer. With George Price,
nothing was ever straightforward. George married a devout Roman Catholic.
He was an equally avid atheist. This isn't going to last,

(12:09):
George's friends. The couple had two daughters and argued about
how to raise them. His wife had been educated by
nuns at Sacred Heart. George told her, I'd rather our
daughters grow up to be prostitutes than nuns. His wife
divorced him. George struggled to afford the alimony. Then there

(12:34):
was George's health. Doctors found a tumor in his thyroid.
It would have to come out, but the operation went wrong.
It left him numb in parts of his face and
with limited use of an arm. By nineteen sixty seven,
George was forty five years old. His professional life had

(12:56):
been a disappointment, his personal life a disaster. But there
was one bit of good news. He had just won
an insurance payout over his botched operation. He still felt
sure he had some brilliant achievement within him. He decided
on a fresh start. He'd moved to London and live

(13:18):
on his insurance money while he took some time out
to read. Surely he'd come up with some kind of
brilliant idea about something. George wrote to his teenage daughters.
I've seen quite a lot of London so far, including
the British Museum Library, Museum of Natural History Library, the
University of London Library, the University College Library, the Welcome

(13:42):
Historical Medical Library, and Science and Technology Library. Soon I
hoped to visit the Royal College of Surgeon's Library and
Royal Zoological Society Library. In one of the libraries in
an obscure publication called the Journal of Theoretical Biology. George
Price happened upon an article by someone called Bill Hamilton.

(14:07):
George was profoundly shocked. Surely Hamilton's ideas couldn't be right.
We'll hear what those ideas were after the break. If
you wanted to understand Bill Hamilton's ideas, Bill Hamilton might

(14:31):
have been the worst person to ask. Hamilton was an
original thinker, but a terrible lecturer, notorious for standing with
his back to the audience, mumbling inaudibly while he scribbled
equations on a blackboard. Here's one description of a Hamilton performance.

(14:51):
He lectured for a full forty five minutes without yet
getting to the point. When he realized that he was
five minutes over time and still had not gotten to
the point, or indeed very near it, he asked if
he could have some more time and called for slides.
The room went dark and there was a rum an,
a roaring sound as about ninety percent of the audience

(15:12):
took this opportunity to exit the room for some fresh air.
Some students were nearly trampled. Years later, another evolutionary biologist
translated Bill Hamilton's ideas into understandable language. In a book
that became a best seller, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins,

(15:35):
this is what Bill Hamilton had realized. Behavior that looks
altruistic from the point of view of an individual can
look self interested from the point of view of a gene.
Remember the noble squirrel who squeaks out a warning when
she sees a predator. She puts herself at risk that

(15:57):
gives the other squirrels a better chance of escaping. If
she's related to those other squirrels, that means they're going
to share some of her genes, including any genes that
predispose her to squeak when she sees a predator. If
the risk of raising the alarm is outweighed by the
chance of saving enough related squirrels, the alarm raising genes

(16:21):
can spread. It all came down to mathematics about risks
and costs and benefits and degrees of genetic relatedness. Wasps
can be related in unusual ways, with worker wasps sharing
more genes with the offspring of their queen than they
would with any offspring of their own. From the gene's

(16:44):
point of view, it makes perfect sense for the worker
wasps to give up on reproducing themselves and help the
queen to reproduce instead. Hamilton's paper and the Journal of
Theoretical Biology showed how a gene's eye view could explain
altruistic behavior in a range of species. The squirrel and

(17:05):
the wasps aren't acting for the good of the species
or the good of the group. They're not acting in
their own individual interests either. Instead, they are playthings of
their genes. When Charles Darwin published his Theory of Evolution

(17:27):
in eighteen fifty nine, it shocked members of polite society.
One much repeated story has two upper class ladies discussing
Darwin's book. Mister Darwin says, we are descended from the apes,
says one. Let us hope it isn't true. But if
it is true, says the other, let us pray that

(17:51):
it does not become generally known. Bill Hamilton's paper had
much the same effect on George Price. Sitting in a
library in London, Price thought about what Hamilton's ideas implied.
If the self interest of genes could account for for
altruistic seeming behavior in wasps and squirrels, it might explain

(18:14):
altruistic instincts in humans too. Maybe deep down in human
nature there wasn't something good and pure and noble. After all,
the thought seemed deeply depressing to George Price, but it
also seemed to Price that he had found his opportunity

(18:37):
to do something brilliant. He was going to prove Bill
Hamilton wrong. There was just one problem. Price didn't know
any of the necessary mathematics, but he had time on
his hands. Maybe he could learn. In September nineteen sixty eight,

(18:58):
George Price knocked on the door of the Galton Laboratory
in London. He didn't know anyone at the Galton Laboratory.
He just thought it would be the type of place
that might contain some one wou'd be able to understand
what he'd been working on. Price said, I've got an
equation I'd like to show someone. I think it might

(19:19):
be important, but it's very simple, so simple, I find
it hard to believe that nobody's discovered it before. That's
why I want an expert to take a look. Have
you got a mathematical geneticist I can talk to imagine
how that must have looked. An American man in his
mid forties with no relevant academic credentials turns up brandishing

(19:44):
an equation. What are the chances that it actually is important?
And what are the chances that the man is a crank?
But as it happened, the Galton Laboratory did have a
mathematical geneticist who'd be willing to see George Price, the
professor who had once supervised Bill Hamilton. The professor looked

(20:05):
at Price's equation. It was indeed simple, but hm, it
was elegant. It was interesting, very interesting, and no, the
professor assured George, nobody had discovered it before. In fact,
he'd never seen anything like it. He'd certainly like to

(20:27):
see what you might be able to do with that equation.
On the spot, he offered George a job. George must
have had mixed feelings. On the one hand, he now
had an office and an income. This was wonderful and
totally unexpected, he wrote home to his mother. On the

(20:49):
other hand, he had wanted to prove Bill Hamilton wrong,
but the equation he had discovered did quite the opposite.
It showed that Hamilton's ideas were essentially correct. From his
new position at the Galton Laboratory, Price sent his equation

(21:10):
to Bill Hamilton. Hamilton was now working at a university's
field station in the countryside outside London. He understood at
once what Price had done, and was amazed by it.
Price had approached Hamilton's work using a branch of mathematics
that Hamilton had never even considered. Because Price hadn't studied biology,

(21:35):
he hadn't used the mathematical techniques which biologists learn. Instead,
he tried to work everything out from first principles. He'd
taught himself a mathematical approach called covariance analysis. The equation
he'd come up with was a simple depiction of how
a gene's prevalence changes from one generation to the next.

(21:58):
It's not that Price had discovered something new exactly. He'd
come up with a new way of looking at things.
It was as if Bill Hamilton had scaled a mountain
and George Price had shown him there was an easier
way up the other side, a new road, wrote Hamilton,
amid startling landscapes. Hamilton used Price his mathematics to reformulate

(22:24):
all his results in a vastly more economical and appropriate way.
He sent it off to Nature, the prestigious journal that
had rejected his earlier paper. This time they said yes,
Price's mathematics were not only clearer, but more general. They
helped to frame debate among biologists about cases where group

(22:47):
selection might still play a role in evolution. As they
explored the implications of Price's equation, Bill and George became friends.
It seemed to Bill, he wrote that George was like
his second self. On the face of it, George Price's

(23:09):
start in London had been an astonishing success. It wasn't
just his equation. He tried applying ideas from game theory
to evolution, just as he had once used them to
analyze the threat from the Soviets. It turned out to
be a rich source of insights. Other biologists started to
get into game theory too, but with George Price, nothing

(23:34):
was ever straightforward. One day, George told Bill that he'd
been thinking, how on earth had he come up with
his equation? After all, he said, when I came across
your paper, I didn't know a covariance from a coconut.
Yet somehow he'd taught himself just the right kind of

(23:57):
mathematical technique to discover something that was simple and powerful,
and that other brilliant minds had missed for decades. It
was a miracle. Bill assumed that George must be talking figuratively,
but no, George was deadly serious. Truly, it was a miracle.

(24:21):
God had deemed that humans were ready to hear this
truth about evolution, and God had chosen him, George Price,
to pass on this truth. George Price, the lifelong atheist,
had found religion. He would now devote his life to

(24:43):
doing whatever God wanted him to do. And what God
wanted him to do, he decided, must be an altruist,
the most extreme kind of altruist he could possibly imagine.
Cautionary tales, will be back after the break. George Price

(25:10):
had a vision of Jesus, in which Jesus said to him,
give to everyone who asks of you, and whoever takes
away what is yours, do not demand it back, right,
thought George. He began to seek out the seedier streets
and squares of central London and introduce himself to homeless people.

(25:35):
My name is George. Is there any way I can
help you? Yes, said some of those people. You can
give me money, you can buy me a sandwich. You
can invite me back to your home to sleep for
the night. George did, and they stayed, and he gave
them keys. Soon his flat was filled with homeless guests.

(25:59):
Most were alcoholics, some had recently been released from mental asylums.
Others were ex convicts or on the run, which his
friends were concerned. Don't worry, George told them. If I'm
obeying Jesus, he will protect me from serious harm. When

(26:20):
the lease on George's flat ran out, George's guests were
homeless again, as was George. He'd been thinking he should
probably rent somewhere else, somewhere bigger, but somehow he hadn't
quite got around to it. He started sleeping in his
office at the Galton Laboratory, though he wasn't there much

(26:40):
during the day. As he explained in a letter to
his brother, A substantial amount of my time is given
trying to help people in almost any way they asked me,
wrote George, whether it's by giving them money, cleaning a
filthy kitchen, or trying to solve some mathematical problem for
somebody here at work. Many times I find myself produced

(27:03):
to one penny, a halfpenny, or zero. Most of my
possessions have been given a including my coat. But I'll
have to pick up a coat somewhere now with winter
coming on. In nineteen seventy three, the prestigious journal Nature
put on its front cover an article about game theory

(27:26):
and evolution, co authored by George and a colleague at
the Galton Laboratory. It was quite a coupe, but living
at the Galton was becoming difficult. One of the people
George was trying to help was a woman who wanted
to hide from her abusive partner. Now the partner had

(27:46):
turned up at the Galton, drunk and aggressive, yelling up
at George's window, where is she? What have you done
with her? The man smashed a bicycle lamper, grabbed someone's
satchel through the papers over the pavement, then unzipped his
trousers and took a piss on the front steps. George
wrote optimistically to his daughter, I expect that one cover

(28:10):
illustrated article in Nature compensates for one urination at the
entrance to the building. But George was overestimating the patience
of the Galton. They told him this had gone too far.
He'd have to find somewhere else to sleep. He found
a room in a squat in a derelict old building

(28:32):
in central London. Gradually he stopped going to the Galton
at all. Bill Hamilton had shown how altruism could evolve
among relatives. Now another biologist, using game theory showed how
it could evolve among non relatives too. But if you

(28:54):
hope for something good and pure and noble in human nature,
this new idea of reciprocal altruism wasn't going to help you.
Broadly speaking, you do a favor for someone when they're
in need, then they return the favor when you're in need.
The evolution of friendship is firmly rooted in the self

(29:15):
interest of the genes. It was all a far cry
from what the vision of Jesus had whispered to George.
Give to everyone who asks of you, and whoever takes
away what is yours, do not demand it back. That
was pure altruism. But was it realistic? One of the

(29:39):
former guests at George's flat didn't think so. Smoky had
been in and out of prison thirty times. Now he
was back in again. He wrote to George with some
friendly advice. Stop going out on the streets to seek
out homeless drunks. These people have no respect for you,

(30:03):
wrote Smokey. All they want is money and drink. You
have consider yourself now and again. Smokey might not have
studied game theory, but he clearly intuitively felt that George's
altruism made no sense without the promise of reciprocity. Do

(30:24):
they worry about you, he asked, when you're broken hungry?
I doubt it very much. Give them half the chance
and they would squeeze you dry. Smokey signed off this
piece of wisdom with a request for cash, when George replied,
ten or fifteen pounds if you can manage. Bill Hamilton

(30:46):
lived in the countryside now, but he sought George out
when he came to London. He was shocked. George was
stick thin his teeth. We was starting to rot. Come
and visit me, said Bill. George did in December nineteen
seventy four. Bill showed him the papers he was working

(31:08):
on using Jawdge's co variance mathematics. Come back to work,
said Bill. Let's do a project together. George seemed enthusiastic.
Bill had flights booked with his wife to visit the
in laws for Christmas, but he made George promise to
come back in January and stay again. Instead, Bill returned

(31:33):
to a letter from the police in London. His name
had been found on some papers in a squat left
by a man who'd killed himself. A man called George Price.
Bill went to collect the papers. He walked up the
stairs and the derelict building to the room where George

(31:55):
had been living. A light bulb hung from the ceiling.
The window was broken, patched up with brown tape. There
was a mattress, cardboard, boxes filled with papers, and dried
blood on the floor. George Price had been deeply shocked

(32:20):
by the idea that altruistic instincts might be explained by
the self interest of genes. Then he had become a
religious convert, apparently determined to prove that altruism can be
good and pure and noble. It's impossible not to see

(32:41):
a connection. Still, though George Price's story isn't quite that neat,
his altruism was part of a wider mental breakdown that's
clear when you look at some of the other things
George was convinced God wanted him to do. To start with,
marry the eighteen year old daughter of one of his

(33:02):
old friends. When the horrified girl said no, he decided
God wanted him to marry a woman he'd met once
a lecture. When she said no, and he persisted, and
she told him never to contact her again. He warned
her that the devil was leading her astray. Then George

(33:22):
decided God wanted him to remarry his ex wife, the
mother of his daughters. He wrote her a letter to propose.
I can understand if you don't want to have anything
to do with me. I'm not in very good condition physically.
My financial condition is rather uncertain. On the positive side,

(33:42):
you would find me much kinder than before. As George
increasingly spiraled, he decided to stop taking his medication. The
medication he needed to replace the thyroid hormone, since it
had his thyroid removed. He reasoned that if God still

(34:02):
had plans for him, God would find a way to
get the medication into him. George collapsed and was taken
to hospital. By the time he woke up, a doctor
had run tests and given him the medicine he needed.
To George, it seemed like a miracle. Shortly before his death,

(34:27):
George stopped taking his medicine again. Perhaps that was another test,
and perhaps this time he concluded that God was choosing
not to intervene. George Price was killed by his mental illness,
not his mathematics, But it isn't hard to see why

(34:50):
Price thought there was something dark about what his own
equation helped to prove. When we feel an instinct to
feed the hungry, give shelter to the homeless, or lend
our coat to someone who's cold, maybe that's not the
better angels of our nature talking. It's our selfish genes

(35:11):
shaped by untold generations, of helping our distant cousins or
having our favors repaid. But is the idea really that
depressing evolution? After all, has given us something else, rational minds.
We can use our rational minds to transcend our selfish genes.

(35:37):
We can think our way to being good and pure
and noble if we choose, can't we. In the next
episode of Cautionary Tales, the moral philosophers get involved and
we meet an altruist who might be even more extreme

(35:57):
than George Price, though in a very different way. Two
keys sources for this episode are The Price of Altruism
by Orn Harmon and Nature's Oracle by uli Ka Segastrell.

(36:18):
For a full list of our sources, please see Tim
Harford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim
Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines and Ryan Dilly. It's
produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rusk. The sound design
and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional

(36:39):
sound design is by Carlos san Juan at Brain Audio Bender.
Daf Haffrey edited the scripts. The show features the voice
talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jupp, Massaamnroe,
Jamal Westman and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have
been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne,

(37:02):
Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey
and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
It's recorded at Wardoor Studios in London by Tom Berry.
If you like the show, please remember to share, rate
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(37:22):
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