Speaker 1: Pushkin a warning before we start. This cautionary tale discusses
Speaker 1: death by suicide. If you're suffering emotional distress or you're
Speaker 1: having suicidal thoughts, support is available, for example, from the
Speaker 1: nine eight to eight Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the US.
Speaker 1: Bill Hamilton is on his way to a funeral where
Speaker 1: in London it's January nineteen seventy five. Hamilton is an
Speaker 1: academic obscure to the general public, but well on his
Speaker 1: way to becoming a superstar in his field. That field
Speaker 1: is evolution. Hamilton is a brilliant naturalist. Go with him
Speaker 1: on a walk and he'll tell you everything there is
Speaker 1: to know about every plant, bird, and insect you encounter.
Speaker 1: Hamilton is also a highly original thinker. He'll later be
Speaker 1: described as the greatest Darwinian since Darwin himself. Bill Hamilton
Speaker 1: can't help but feel a twinge of guilt about the
Speaker 1: death of the man whose funeral he's going to attend.
Speaker 1: Could he have done more to prevent it? In some ways,
Speaker 1: George Price had been a close and dear friend. He
Speaker 1: had been staying at Hamilton's house just a couple of
Speaker 1: weeks before his death. In other ways, though, how well
Speaker 1: had anyone known George Price. Really, Price had been a
Speaker 1: strange man, a very strange man. Indeed, Hamilton gets to
Speaker 1: the funeral service, there are only a handful of mourners.
Speaker 1: He recognizes one, a fellow, high powered academic who works
Speaker 1: on evolution and game theory. The other mourners are entirely different,
Speaker 1: ruddy cheeked, shaggy haired, wearing old and grubby clothes, and
Speaker 1: smelling of urine. They look like homeless drunks. That's because
Speaker 1: they are homeless drunks. But they're standing quietly in respectful mourning.
Speaker 1: Hamilton is moved by their obvious grief. These unfortunate people
Speaker 1: must have really loved George Price. What sort of life
Speaker 1: do you have to have lived to end up with
Speaker 1: a funeral attended by these two types of people, distinguished
Speaker 1: academic scientists and homeless drunks. I'm Tim Harford, and you're
Speaker 1: listening to cautionary tales. As a young man, Bill Hamilton
Speaker 1: was mystified by altruistic behavior, something that incurs a cost
Speaker 1: to you and benefits someone else. In human terms. Altruism
Speaker 1: doesn't feel like it ought to be much of a mystery.
Speaker 1: It's instinctive. It feels good to feed the hungry, give
Speaker 1: shelter to the homeless, lend our coat to someone who's cold.
Speaker 1: Asking why is liable to make you sound like a psychopath.
Speaker 1: The obvious explanation is that deep down in human nature
Speaker 1: there must be something good and pure and noble, the
Speaker 1: better angels of our nature. We'd like to think so.
Speaker 1: But what about other kinds of animal? Here it starts
Speaker 1: to get easier to understand why altruism mystified Bill Hamilton.
Speaker 1: Take the ground squirrel, for example, a bunch of squirrels
Speaker 1: about foraging for nuts when a hawk appears in the sky.
Speaker 1: The squirrel who first spots the hawk instinctively squeaks out
Speaker 1: to alert the other squirrels, who all scurry for cover.
Speaker 1: That alarm call is an act of altruism. The squirrel
Speaker 1: who calls out is attracting attention to herself as all
Speaker 1: the other squirrels dash for safety, and the hawk looks
Speaker 1: to see where the squeak came from. The hawk is
Speaker 1: quite likely to come after her. If instead the squirrel
Speaker 1: had reacted by quietly finding cover herself, she'd be more
Speaker 1: likely to survive while the hawk attacked some other squirrel.
Speaker 1: So why doesn't she maybe it's because deep down in
Speaker 1: squirrel nature there's something good and pure and noble. Maybe,
Speaker 1: but it seems like a stretch. It's even more of
Speaker 1: a stretch when you get to another creature that can
Speaker 1: be surprisingly altruistic, the wasp. As an evolutionary biologist, Bill
Speaker 1: Hamilton worked mostly with mathematics, but he loved to get
Speaker 1: out in nature to study wasps or any kind of flying, crawling, buzzing, biting,
Speaker 1: stinging things. On field trips in tropical locations, Hamilton was
Speaker 1: notorious for seeking out random holes to plunge his hand
Speaker 1: into to investigate what exotic insects might be lurking inside.
Speaker 1: Every time I turned round, recalled a colleague, he'd be
Speaker 1: climbing a tree or wading up a river. During one
Speaker 1: expedition to Brazil, Hamilton spotted that an unfamiliar species of
Speaker 1: wasp had built a nest in the middle of a
Speaker 1: disused termite mound. He wanted to find out more about
Speaker 1: this species, so he dug a two meter tunnel to
Speaker 1: get into the nest from below. The worker wasps are
Speaker 1: extremely fierce, reported Hamilton, and leave there's stings in human
Speaker 1: flesh like honeybees. They jet venom, and this often reaches
Speaker 1: the eyes. I was incapacitated for two days after my
Speaker 1: first observation of this nest. Not but things like this
Speaker 1: put him off. By the end of his career, Hamilton
Speaker 1: reckoned he must have been stung by at least a
Speaker 1: thousand different species of wasp, but all that lay ahead.
Speaker 1: As a young student at Cambridge University in the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: Hamilton wanted to understand in general terms, the altruism of
Speaker 1: worker wasps. In some wasp species, they devote their lives
Speaker 1: to protecting their queen. Only the queen gets to breed.
Speaker 1: The workers never have offspring of their own. In evolutionary terms,
Speaker 1: it's quite the sacrifice. Why do the worker wasps do it?
Speaker 1: When young Hamilton asked his Cambridge professors that question, the
Speaker 1: professors didn't think it was a puzzle at all. They
Speaker 1: simply shrugged. Obviously, the wasps are acting for the good
Speaker 1: of the species. And the squirrel who raises an alarm
Speaker 1: when a predator appears, Oh, she's serving the group of
Speaker 1: squirrels to which she belongs, and that must help the
Speaker 1: group to compete with other groups. That seemed like woolly
Speaker 1: thinking to Bill. He thought natural selection works on individuals,
Speaker 1: not groups or species. A squirrel who quietly hid when
Speaker 1: she saw a hawk would have a better chance of
Speaker 1: surviving than a squirrel who so helplessly raised the alarm.
Speaker 1: But expect the genes for quiet hiding to spread. Yet
Speaker 1: it was the genes for alarm raising that had won out.
Speaker 1: Why Hamilton was determined to solve the mystery, but he
Speaker 1: found it hard to get funding for postgraduate research when
Speaker 1: nobody else even agreed with him that there was any
Speaker 1: mystery to be solved. Hamilton later recalled, at times I
Speaker 1: was sure I saw something that others had not seen.
Speaker 1: At others I felt equally certain that I must be
Speaker 1: a crank. How could it be that respected academics around
Speaker 1: me would not see the interest of studying altruism along
Speaker 1: my lines unless it were true that my enterprise were
Speaker 1: bogus in some way that was obvious to all of
Speaker 1: them but not to me. Hamilton managed to find some
Speaker 1: funds and an academic to supervise his PhD, a mathematical
Speaker 1: geneticist at the Galton Laboratory in London, not that even
Speaker 1: his supervisor really got what he was trying to achieve.
Speaker 1: At first, most of the time, Hamilton recalled, I was
Speaker 1: extremely lonely in the evenings when London's libraries closed for
Speaker 1: the night. He couldn't face going back to his dingy
Speaker 1: rented room, so he sat on a bench in a
Speaker 1: railway station just for the sense of having people around
Speaker 1: him while he scribbled equations in his note book. Finally,
Speaker 1: Hamilton got his ideas in order, but who might be
Speaker 1: willing to publish them? He tried the prestigious journal Nature
Speaker 1: and got rejected out of hand. His supervisor reckoned. His
Speaker 1: best chance was an obscure new publication, the Journal of
Speaker 1: Theoretical Biology. Hamilton sent his manuscript off. George Price had
Speaker 1: often seemed on the verge of achieving something brilliant, but
Speaker 1: somehow nothing ever quite worked out. Price got a degree
Speaker 1: in chemistry from the University of Chicago during the Second
Speaker 1: World War and went straight to work on the Manhattan Project,
Speaker 1: then Harvard, then Bell Labs. He wrote big think articles
Speaker 1: for popular magazines. One was about game theory and the
Speaker 1: nuclear threat from the Soviet Union. A publisher was impressed
Speaker 1: and offered George in advance to write a book. George
Speaker 1: took the money, but somehow never quite managed to finish
Speaker 1: the book. Another article imagined a futuristic design machine that
Speaker 1: might speed up invention. It looks a lot like what
Speaker 1: we've now got, a computer aided design. Was it really
Speaker 1: a practical possibility? Yes, said George. He followed up his
Speaker 1: magazine piece with a more detailed technical proposal based on
Speaker 1: existing IBM computers ahead of. IBM's research department was impressed
Speaker 1: and offered George a job, but IBM wouldn't categorically commit
Speaker 1: to making George's design machine, so George said no. He'd
Speaker 1: patent his idea himself. But he hadn't looked into patenting
Speaker 1: before he turned down IBM, and when he did, he
Speaker 1: discovered that he couldn't afford a patent lawyer. With George Price,
Speaker 1: nothing was ever straightforward. George married a devout Roman Catholic.
Speaker 1: He was an equally avid atheist. This isn't going to last,
Speaker 1: George's friends. The couple had two daughters and argued about
Speaker 1: how to raise them. His wife had been educated by
Speaker 1: nuns at Sacred Heart. George told her, I'd rather our
Speaker 1: daughters grow up to be prostitutes than nuns. His wife
Speaker 1: divorced him. George struggled to afford the alimony. Then there
Speaker 1: was George's health. Doctors found a tumor in his thyroid.
Speaker 1: It would have to come out, but the operation went wrong.
Speaker 1: It left him numb in parts of his face and
Speaker 1: with limited use of an arm. By nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 1: George was forty five years old. His professional life had
Speaker 1: been a disappointment, his personal life a disaster. But there
Speaker 1: was one bit of good news. He had just won
Speaker 1: an insurance payout over his botched operation. He still felt
Speaker 1: sure he had some brilliant achievement within him. He decided
Speaker 1: on a fresh start. He'd moved to London and live
Speaker 1: on his insurance money while he took some time out
Speaker 1: to read. Surely he'd come up with some kind of
Speaker 1: brilliant idea about something. George wrote to his teenage daughters.
Speaker 1: I've seen quite a lot of London so far, including
Speaker 1: the British Museum Library, Museum of Natural History Library, the
Speaker 1: University of London Library, the University College Library, the Welcome
Speaker 1: Historical Medical Library, and Science and Technology Library. Soon I
Speaker 1: hoped to visit the Royal College of Surgeon's Library and
Speaker 1: Royal Zoological Society Library. In one of the libraries in
Speaker 1: an obscure publication called the Journal of Theoretical Biology. George
Speaker 1: Price happened upon an article by someone called Bill Hamilton.
Speaker 1: George was profoundly shocked. Surely Hamilton's ideas couldn't be right.
Speaker 1: We'll hear what those ideas were after the break. If
Speaker 1: you wanted to understand Bill Hamilton's ideas, Bill Hamilton might
Speaker 1: have been the worst person to ask. Hamilton was an
Speaker 1: original thinker, but a terrible lecturer, notorious for standing with
Speaker 1: his back to the audience, mumbling inaudibly while he scribbled
Speaker 1: equations on a blackboard. Here's one description of a Hamilton performance.
Speaker 1: He lectured for a full forty five minutes without yet
Speaker 1: getting to the point. When he realized that he was
Speaker 1: five minutes over time and still had not gotten to
Speaker 1: the point, or indeed very near it, he asked if
Speaker 1: he could have some more time and called for slides.
Speaker 1: The room went dark and there was a rum an,
Speaker 1: a roaring sound as about ninety percent of the audience
Speaker 1: took this opportunity to exit the room for some fresh air.
Speaker 1: Some students were nearly trampled. Years later, another evolutionary biologist
Speaker 1: translated Bill Hamilton's ideas into understandable language. In a book
Speaker 1: that became a best seller, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins,
Speaker 1: this is what Bill Hamilton had realized. Behavior that looks
Speaker 1: altruistic from the point of view of an individual can
Speaker 1: look self interested from the point of view of a gene.
Speaker 1: Remember the noble squirrel who squeaks out a warning when
Speaker 1: she sees a predator. She puts herself at risk that
Speaker 1: gives the other squirrels a better chance of escaping. If
Speaker 1: she's related to those other squirrels, that means they're going
Speaker 1: to share some of her genes, including any genes that
Speaker 1: predispose her to squeak when she sees a predator. If
Speaker 1: the risk of raising the alarm is outweighed by the
Speaker 1: chance of saving enough related squirrels, the alarm raising genes
Speaker 1: can spread. It all came down to mathematics about risks
Speaker 1: and costs and benefits and degrees of genetic relatedness. Wasps
Speaker 1: can be related in unusual ways, with worker wasps sharing
Speaker 1: more genes with the offspring of their queen than they
Speaker 1: would with any offspring of their own. From the gene's
Speaker 1: point of view, it makes perfect sense for the worker
Speaker 1: wasps to give up on reproducing themselves and help the
Speaker 1: queen to reproduce instead. Hamilton's paper and the Journal of
Speaker 1: Theoretical Biology showed how a gene's eye view could explain
Speaker 1: altruistic behavior in a range of species. The squirrel and
Speaker 1: the wasps aren't acting for the good of the species
Speaker 1: or the good of the group. They're not acting in
Speaker 1: their own individual interests either. Instead, they are playthings of
Speaker 1: their genes. When Charles Darwin published his Theory of Evolution
Speaker 1: in eighteen fifty nine, it shocked members of polite society.
Speaker 1: One much repeated story has two upper class ladies discussing
Speaker 1: Darwin's book. Mister Darwin says, we are descended from the apes,
Speaker 1: says one. Let us hope it isn't true. But if
Speaker 1: it is true, says the other, let us pray that
Speaker 1: it does not become generally known. Bill Hamilton's paper had
Speaker 1: much the same effect on George Price. Sitting in a
Speaker 1: library in London, Price thought about what Hamilton's ideas implied.
Speaker 1: If the self interest of genes could account for for
Speaker 1: altruistic seeming behavior in wasps and squirrels, it might explain
Speaker 1: altruistic instincts in humans too. Maybe deep down in human
Speaker 1: nature there wasn't something good and pure and noble. After all,
Speaker 1: the thought seemed deeply depressing to George Price, but it
Speaker 1: also seemed to Price that he had found his opportunity
Speaker 1: to do something brilliant. He was going to prove Bill
Speaker 1: Hamilton wrong. There was just one problem. Price didn't know
Speaker 1: any of the necessary mathematics, but he had time on
Speaker 1: his hands. Maybe he could learn. In September nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: George Price knocked on the door of the Galton Laboratory
Speaker 1: in London. He didn't know anyone at the Galton Laboratory.
Speaker 1: He just thought it would be the type of place
Speaker 1: that might contain some one wou'd be able to understand
Speaker 1: what he'd been working on. Price said, I've got an
Speaker 1: equation I'd like to show someone. I think it might
Speaker 1: be important, but it's very simple, so simple, I find
Speaker 1: it hard to believe that nobody's discovered it before. That's
Speaker 1: why I want an expert to take a look. Have
Speaker 1: you got a mathematical geneticist I can talk to imagine
Speaker 1: how that must have looked. An American man in his
Speaker 1: mid forties with no relevant academic credentials turns up brandishing
Speaker 1: an equation. What are the chances that it actually is important?
Speaker 1: And what are the chances that the man is a crank?
Speaker 1: But as it happened, the Galton Laboratory did have a
Speaker 1: mathematical geneticist who'd be willing to see George Price, the
Speaker 1: professor who had once supervised Bill Hamilton. The professor looked
Speaker 1: at Price's equation. It was indeed simple, but hm, it
Speaker 1: was elegant. It was interesting, very interesting, and no, the
Speaker 1: professor assured George, nobody had discovered it before. In fact,
Speaker 1: he'd never seen anything like it. He'd certainly like to
Speaker 1: see what you might be able to do with that equation.
Speaker 1: On the spot, he offered George a job. George must
Speaker 1: have had mixed feelings. On the one hand, he now
Speaker 1: had an office and an income. This was wonderful and
Speaker 1: totally unexpected, he wrote home to his mother. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, he had wanted to prove Bill Hamilton wrong,
Speaker 1: but the equation he had discovered did quite the opposite.
Speaker 1: It showed that Hamilton's ideas were essentially correct. From his
Speaker 1: new position at the Galton Laboratory, Price sent his equation
Speaker 1: to Bill Hamilton. Hamilton was now working at a university's
Speaker 1: field station in the countryside outside London. He understood at
Speaker 1: once what Price had done, and was amazed by it.
Speaker 1: Price had approached Hamilton's work using a branch of mathematics
Speaker 1: that Hamilton had never even considered. Because Price hadn't studied biology,
Speaker 1: he hadn't used the mathematical techniques which biologists learn. Instead,
Speaker 1: he tried to work everything out from first principles. He'd
Speaker 1: taught himself a mathematical approach called covariance analysis. The equation
Speaker 1: he'd come up with was a simple depiction of how
Speaker 1: a gene's prevalence changes from one generation to the next.
Speaker 1: It's not that Price had discovered something new exactly. He'd
Speaker 1: come up with a new way of looking at things.
Speaker 1: It was as if Bill Hamilton had scaled a mountain
Speaker 1: and George Price had shown him there was an easier
Speaker 1: way up the other side, a new road, wrote Hamilton,
Speaker 1: amid startling landscapes. Hamilton used Price his mathematics to reformulate
Speaker 1: all his results in a vastly more economical and appropriate way.
Speaker 1: He sent it off to Nature, the prestigious journal that
Speaker 1: had rejected his earlier paper. This time they said yes,
Speaker 1: Price's mathematics were not only clearer, but more general. They
Speaker 1: helped to frame debate among biologists about cases where group
Speaker 1: selection might still play a role in evolution. As they
Speaker 1: explored the implications of Price's equation, Bill and George became friends.
Speaker 1: It seemed to Bill, he wrote that George was like
Speaker 1: his second self. On the face of it, George Price's
Speaker 1: start in London had been an astonishing success. It wasn't
Speaker 1: just his equation. He tried applying ideas from game theory
Speaker 1: to evolution, just as he had once used them to
Speaker 1: analyze the threat from the Soviets. It turned out to
Speaker 1: be a rich source of insights. Other biologists started to
Speaker 1: get into game theory too, but with George Price, nothing
Speaker 1: was ever straightforward. One day, George told Bill that he'd
Speaker 1: been thinking, how on earth had he come up with
Speaker 1: his equation? After all, he said, when I came across
Speaker 1: your paper, I didn't know a covariance from a coconut.
Speaker 1: Yet somehow he'd taught himself just the right kind of
Speaker 1: mathematical technique to discover something that was simple and powerful,
Speaker 1: and that other brilliant minds had missed for decades. It
Speaker 1: was a miracle. Bill assumed that George must be talking figuratively,
Speaker 1: but no, George was deadly serious. Truly, it was a miracle.
Speaker 1: God had deemed that humans were ready to hear this
Speaker 1: truth about evolution, and God had chosen him, George Price,
Speaker 1: to pass on this truth. George Price, the lifelong atheist,
Speaker 1: had found religion. He would now devote his life to
Speaker 1: doing whatever God wanted him to do. And what God
Speaker 1: wanted him to do, he decided, must be an altruist,
Speaker 1: the most extreme kind of altruist he could possibly imagine.
Speaker 1: Cautionary tales, will be back after the break. George Price
Speaker 1: had a vision of Jesus, in which Jesus said to him,
Speaker 1: give to everyone who asks of you, and whoever takes
Speaker 1: away what is yours, do not demand it back, right,
Speaker 1: thought George. He began to seek out the seedier streets
Speaker 1: and squares of central London and introduce himself to homeless people.
Speaker 1: My name is George. Is there any way I can
Speaker 1: help you? Yes, said some of those people. You can
Speaker 1: give me money, you can buy me a sandwich. You
Speaker 1: can invite me back to your home to sleep for
Speaker 1: the night. George did, and they stayed, and he gave
Speaker 1: them keys. Soon his flat was filled with homeless guests.
Speaker 1: Most were alcoholics, some had recently been released from mental asylums.
Speaker 1: Others were ex convicts or on the run, which his
Speaker 1: friends were concerned. Don't worry, George told them. If I'm
Speaker 1: obeying Jesus, he will protect me from serious harm. When
Speaker 1: the lease on George's flat ran out, George's guests were
Speaker 1: homeless again, as was George. He'd been thinking he should
Speaker 1: probably rent somewhere else, somewhere bigger, but somehow he hadn't
Speaker 1: quite got around to it. He started sleeping in his
Speaker 1: office at the Galton Laboratory, though he wasn't there much
Speaker 1: during the day. As he explained in a letter to
Speaker 1: his brother, A substantial amount of my time is given
Speaker 1: trying to help people in almost any way they asked me,
Speaker 1: wrote George, whether it's by giving them money, cleaning a
Speaker 1: filthy kitchen, or trying to solve some mathematical problem for
Speaker 1: somebody here at work. Many times I find myself produced
Speaker 1: to one penny, a halfpenny, or zero. Most of my
Speaker 1: possessions have been given a including my coat. But I'll
Speaker 1: have to pick up a coat somewhere now with winter
Speaker 1: coming on. In nineteen seventy three, the prestigious journal Nature
Speaker 1: put on its front cover an article about game theory
Speaker 1: and evolution, co authored by George and a colleague at
Speaker 1: the Galton Laboratory. It was quite a coupe, but living
Speaker 1: at the Galton was becoming difficult. One of the people
Speaker 1: George was trying to help was a woman who wanted
Speaker 1: to hide from her abusive partner. Now the partner had
Speaker 1: turned up at the Galton, drunk and aggressive, yelling up
Speaker 1: at George's window, where is she? What have you done
Speaker 1: with her? The man smashed a bicycle lamper, grabbed someone's
Speaker 1: satchel through the papers over the pavement, then unzipped his
Speaker 1: trousers and took a piss on the front steps. George
Speaker 1: wrote optimistically to his daughter, I expect that one cover
Speaker 1: illustrated article in Nature compensates for one urination at the
Speaker 1: entrance to the building. But George was overestimating the patience
Speaker 1: of the Galton. They told him this had gone too far.
Speaker 1: He'd have to find somewhere else to sleep. He found
Speaker 1: a room in a squat in a derelict old building
Speaker 1: in central London. Gradually he stopped going to the Galton
Speaker 1: at all. Bill Hamilton had shown how altruism could evolve
Speaker 1: among relatives. Now another biologist, using game theory showed how
Speaker 1: it could evolve among non relatives too. But if you
Speaker 1: hope for something good and pure and noble in human nature,
Speaker 1: this new idea of reciprocal altruism wasn't going to help you.
Speaker 1: Broadly speaking, you do a favor for someone when they're
Speaker 1: in need, then they return the favor when you're in need.
Speaker 1: The evolution of friendship is firmly rooted in the self
Speaker 1: interest of the genes. It was all a far cry
Speaker 1: from what the vision of Jesus had whispered to George.
Speaker 1: Give to everyone who asks of you, and whoever takes
Speaker 1: away what is yours, do not demand it back. That
Speaker 1: was pure altruism. But was it realistic? One of the
Speaker 1: former guests at George's flat didn't think so. Smoky had
Speaker 1: been in and out of prison thirty times. Now he
Speaker 1: was back in again. He wrote to George with some
Speaker 1: friendly advice. Stop going out on the streets to seek
Speaker 1: out homeless drunks. These people have no respect for you,
Speaker 1: wrote Smokey. All they want is money and drink. You
Speaker 1: have consider yourself now and again. Smokey might not have
Speaker 1: studied game theory, but he clearly intuitively felt that George's
Speaker 1: altruism made no sense without the promise of reciprocity. Do
Speaker 1: they worry about you, he asked, when you're broken hungry?
Speaker 1: I doubt it very much. Give them half the chance
Speaker 1: and they would squeeze you dry. Smokey signed off this
Speaker 1: piece of wisdom with a request for cash, when George replied,
Speaker 1: ten or fifteen pounds if you can manage. Bill Hamilton
Speaker 1: lived in the countryside now, but he sought George out
Speaker 1: when he came to London. He was shocked. George was
Speaker 1: stick thin his teeth. We was starting to rot. Come
Speaker 1: and visit me, said Bill. George did in December nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four. Bill showed him the papers he was working
Speaker 1: on using Jawdge's co variance mathematics. Come back to work,
Speaker 1: said Bill. Let's do a project together. George seemed enthusiastic.
Speaker 1: Bill had flights booked with his wife to visit the
Speaker 1: in laws for Christmas, but he made George promise to
Speaker 1: come back in January and stay again. Instead, Bill returned
Speaker 1: to a letter from the police in London. His name
Speaker 1: had been found on some papers in a squat left
Speaker 1: by a man who'd killed himself. A man called George Price.
Speaker 1: Bill went to collect the papers. He walked up the
Speaker 1: stairs and the derelict building to the room where George
Speaker 1: had been living. A light bulb hung from the ceiling.
Speaker 1: The window was broken, patched up with brown tape. There
Speaker 1: was a mattress, cardboard, boxes filled with papers, and dried
Speaker 1: blood on the floor. George Price had been deeply shocked
Speaker 1: by the idea that altruistic instincts might be explained by
Speaker 1: the self interest of genes. Then he had become a
Speaker 1: religious convert, apparently determined to prove that altruism can be
Speaker 1: good and pure and noble. It's impossible not to see
Speaker 1: a connection. Still, though George Price's story isn't quite that neat,
Speaker 1: his altruism was part of a wider mental breakdown that's
Speaker 1: clear when you look at some of the other things
Speaker 1: George was convinced God wanted him to do. To start with,
Speaker 1: marry the eighteen year old daughter of one of his
Speaker 1: old friends. When the horrified girl said no, he decided
Speaker 1: God wanted him to marry a woman he'd met once
Speaker 1: a lecture. When she said no, and he persisted, and
Speaker 1: she told him never to contact her again. He warned
Speaker 1: her that the devil was leading her astray. Then George
Speaker 1: decided God wanted him to remarry his ex wife, the
Speaker 1: mother of his daughters. He wrote her a letter to propose.
Speaker 1: I can understand if you don't want to have anything
Speaker 1: to do with me. I'm not in very good condition physically.
Speaker 1: My financial condition is rather uncertain. On the positive side,
Speaker 1: you would find me much kinder than before. As George
Speaker 1: increasingly spiraled, he decided to stop taking his medication. The
Speaker 1: medication he needed to replace the thyroid hormone, since it
Speaker 1: had his thyroid removed. He reasoned that if God still
Speaker 1: had plans for him, God would find a way to
Speaker 1: get the medication into him. George collapsed and was taken
Speaker 1: to hospital. By the time he woke up, a doctor
Speaker 1: had run tests and given him the medicine he needed.
Speaker 1: To George, it seemed like a miracle. Shortly before his death,
Speaker 1: George stopped taking his medicine again. Perhaps that was another test,
Speaker 1: and perhaps this time he concluded that God was choosing
Speaker 1: not to intervene. George Price was killed by his mental illness,
Speaker 1: not his mathematics, But it isn't hard to see why
Speaker 1: Price thought there was something dark about what his own
Speaker 1: equation helped to prove. When we feel an instinct to
Speaker 1: feed the hungry, give shelter to the homeless, or lend
Speaker 1: our coat to someone who's cold, maybe that's not the
Speaker 1: better angels of our nature talking. It's our selfish genes
Speaker 1: shaped by untold generations, of helping our distant cousins or
Speaker 1: having our favors repaid. But is the idea really that
Speaker 1: depressing evolution? After all, has given us something else, rational minds.
Speaker 1: We can use our rational minds to transcend our selfish genes.
Speaker 1: We can think our way to being good and pure
Speaker 1: and noble if we choose, can't we. In the next
Speaker 1: episode of Cautionary Tales, the moral philosophers get involved and
Speaker 1: we meet an altruist who might be even more extreme
Speaker 1: than George Price, though in a very different way. Two
Speaker 1: keys sources for this episode are The Price of Altruism
Speaker 1: by Orn Harmon and Nature's Oracle by uli Ka Segastrell.
Speaker 1: For a full list of our sources, please see Tim
Speaker 1: Harford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim
Speaker 1: Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines and Ryan Dilly. It's
Speaker 1: produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rusk. The sound design
Speaker 1: and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional
Speaker 1: sound design is by Carlos san Juan at Brain Audio Bender.
Speaker 1: Daf Haffrey edited the scripts. The show features the voice
Speaker 1: talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jupp, Massaamnroe,
Speaker 1: Jamal Westman and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have
Speaker 1: been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne,
Speaker 1: Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey
Speaker 1: and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: It's recorded at Wardoor Studios in London by Tom Berry.
Speaker 1: If you like the show, please remember to share, rate
Speaker 1: and review. It really makes a difference to us and
Speaker 1: if you want to hear the show, add free sign
Speaker 1: up to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple
Speaker 1: Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm, slash plus