This book presents a wealth of scientific research bearing on forms of cooperation, helpfulness, even self-sacrifice among many species. Altruism was “an anomalous thorn in Darwin’s side,” Harman argues, a conundrum that Darwinians would need to solve, given their view of the ruthless struggle among living beings for survival:
Harman offers vivid accounts of the lives and writings of a number of evolutionary biologists who have sought answers to such questions, showing how they have intersected with the remarkable career of one man who took questions about altruism to heart as few others have: “the forgotten American genius George Price, atheist-chemist and drifter turned religious evolutionary–mathematician and derelict.”
The man had an incredible work history at a very interesting time in science. Born in 1922, he earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Chicago, even as he worked on uranium enrichment in the Manhattan Project. He went on to do research at Bell Labs, then at the Radioisotope Lab at the Minnesota Veterans Administration Hospital, and later at IBM, while engaging in often vehement controversies about topics such as extrasensory perception and U.S.-Soviet relations. It was only in 1967, after he moved to London and was appointed to a position at the Galton Laboratory, that he focused ever more intensely on problems of altruism.
Harman describes (with three appendices that set forth and elucidate the stages of the equation itself in the context of related ones) how Price arrived at his equation, aiming to explain how natural selection works at different levels at the same time, whether among genes, cells, individuals, families, groups, or even species.
The book’s title also bespeaks the personal cost for Price himself of his struggles during the London years--which I hate to sound like a psychiatrist, but I think had a mental health origin. He ended up living in squalor amongst the marginalized people of society. But his work on altruism is fascinating.
The Price of Altruism is a brilliant book. Hands down one of the most incredible books I've read in the past decade. Go out and purchase it. It's a book every one needs to read
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