[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: All right.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Okay, so let's just do the open.

JAD: All right. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And today, we're gonna be talking—well, let's do it this way. 

JAD: Which way? 

ROBERT: I was at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, big gathering spot for cool people with new books and that particular week ...

ROBERT: Is Richard Dawkins ... 

ROBERT: Richard Dawkins.

[cheering]

JAD: They like him.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: Don't make it so easy for him. 

ROBERT: I decided to begin ... 

ROBERT: This is a real problem for a lot of people ... 

ROBERT: By quoting him to him.

ROBERT: You write—I don't know if it's in this book or some other, "The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose the sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear. Others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites. Thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, disease. It must be so. If there's ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored." [shudders]

RICHARD DAWKINS: Darwin was worried by the same thing. I mean, Darwin recognised the—the total horror of the suffering in nature, it was one of the things that actually made him lose his faith, but he also realized that it's not just a fact that it happens, it's—it's intrinsic to natural selection that it must happen. And when you look at a beautiful animal like a cheetah that appears to be beautifully designed for something, like a cheater is amazingly well designed, apparently, for catching gazelles and gazelles are amazingly well designed for escaping from—from cheetahs. But they are the end products of a sort of evolutionary arms race in which thousands, millions of animals have died. The—the—the shaping, the—the carving of the shape of a cheetah or a gazelle has come about through millions of unsuccessful gazelles being caught, and the successful ones making it through only to be caught later probably, but after reproducing and passing on the genes that help them to escape. So the sheer number of deaths that lie behind the—the—the sculpting of—of these beautiful creatures is horrifying. And—and at the same time, it—it's got a kind of savage beauty.

JAD: Wow. Why did you play me this exactly?

ROBERT: Well, because I was sitting there thinking: I know that cheetahs chase and eat antelopes, but wasn't there a nice cheetah once that went over to the antelope and said, "Hi, have a sandwich together?" And that maybe something about the cheetah and the—had something to do with an act of kindness? I can't imagine ...

JAD: Ah, so you're thinking that maybe it's not just meanness that can sculpt, but maybe niceness can sculpt too.

ROBERT: Exactly. Niceness as a—as a scalpel.

JAD: Niceness as a scalpel. I want to listen to that show. Wait a second. We are that show. We should do it then. Let's do it. Today on Radiolab, goodness ...

ROBERT: Kindness ...

JAD:  ...selflessness ...

ROBERT:  ...altruism. 

JAD: If the world is so cruel, how do you account for it? 

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: How should we think about it? 

ROBERT: And when you do see generosity, how do you know it's really generous?

JAD: All right, so we're going to start the show with a story that sort of embodies the last question you asked about a guy named George Price who is a mathematician we never heard of until our producer, Lynn Levy, told us about him. She heard about it from an author, Oren Harman, who wrote a book called The Price (as in George Price) of Altruism.

OREN HARMAN: You know, this is a high school photo ...

LYNN LEVY: So, okay, so the people on the radio can't see the picture. So, describe what he looks like.

OREN HARMAN: Well, I tell you, he looks a bit like some kind of Scandinavian prince in the 17th century. Good looking guy.

LYNN LEVY: Totally. Definitely something about this guy's eyes.

OREN HARMAN: His eyes ...

LYNN LEVY: Yeah. 

OREN HARMAN: This was described to me by a number of people who knew him. He had a gaze that you sort of walked away from at your own peril. There was something that, you know, he—he sort of knew things. 

LYNN LEVY: You could start George's story anywhere, but let's start in 1943. George graduates from college, and he's this ... 

OREN HARMAN:  ...very kinetic kind of guy ...

LYNN LEVY:  ...really athletic. 

OREN HARMAN: He'd swim in the surf and he did a lot of rock climbing.

LYNN LEVY: And by all accounts, he was ... 

OREN HARMAN:  ...incredibly brilliant. 

LYNN LEVY: And right after college, he starts to kind of bounce through history. 

OREN HARMAN: He was all over the place. 

LYNN LEVY: First place he ends up is ... 

OREN HARMAN:  ...the Manhattan Project on uranium enrichment. So, he's working as a chemist on the atom bomb. When he was done with that ...

LYNN LEVY:  ...after a couple of years ...

OREN HARMAN:  ...he made a 90-degree turn and started working at Bell Labs on transistor research, solved some very basic problems there, and then disappeared like a phantom.

Started working at a medical center on oncology research.

LYNN LEVY:  ...meaning cancer. 

ANNA PRICE: And I remember going to his lab, playing hide and seek. All these bottles and test tubes ...

LYNN LEVY: By this time, George had a wife and two kids ... 

KATHLEEN PRICE: He would look under the microscope, at slides of blood ...

LYNN LEVY:  ...Anna and Kathleen. But he never really saw them that much. 

OREN HARMAN: He'd worked 56 hours straight without sleeping on Benzedrine.

KATHLEEN PRICE: I remember, he was always ... 

OREN HARMAN: Stuff like that ...

KATHLEEN PRICE:  ...gone a lot. 

LYNN LEVY: When the kids are still pretty young ... 

KATHLEEN PRICE:  ...they were like five and six ...

OREN HARMAN: He ... 

LYNN LEVY:  ...left his family. 

OREN HARMAN: Yeah. 

LYNN LEVY: Just left. 

OREN HARMAN: Turned another 90-degree corner and began working on computer-aided design. In fact, he invented computer-aided design. He was firing in all directions.

LYNN LEVY: What do you think was driving him to keep moving from thing to thing?

OREN HARMAN: He just wanted to succeed at any cost. It made no difference in what field. And at one point in time, he was corresponding with about five Nobel laureates, each in a different field. He wanted to have one great discovery that would make his name. 

LYNN LEVY: So that's ... that's George.

JAD: Wow, quite a guy.

LYNN LEVY: Very interesting guy.

JAD: So, what happens next?

LYNN LEVY: So next, what happens is, he gets on a boat and he—he goes to London. 

JAD: When was this, by the way?

LYNN LEVY: It's November 1967. And in London, that's where things, for our purposes, start to really happen. 

JAD: Why? What happens in London?

LYNN LEVY: Well, he starts looking for this question. He goes from library to library. There are 13 libraries that he would hang out at. And the question that he finds for himself, which is weird considering his personal history, is ...

OREN HARMAN: Why family? 

JAD: Like, why do people have families? 

LYNN LEVY: Well, like, why do families stick together?

OREN HARMAN: There are a lot of sort of dynamics within the family where it would make more sense for an individual to sort of break out ...

LYNN LEVY: You know, go it alone, like he has. 

OREN HARMAN: And yet, family persists. And there should be a good reason for it. 

LYNN LEVY: He even wrote about the question to his daughter.

KATHLEEN PRICE: "Dear Kathleen, my big paper will be on the evolutionary origin of the human family. In most species, the father just mates with the mother and she does all the child-rearing herself. But in the human species, the dominant pattern has involved care by adult males toward their own children. Why did our species evolve this way?" You know, it just brings back what kind of a father our father was towards us, and basically there was kind of this benign neglect.

LYNN LEVY: Hmm ...But this question, "Why family?" was only the beginning. "Why family" led him to a bigger question, which is "Why does anybody help anybody?"

JAD: Huh? Well, what do you mean?

LYNN LEVY: If you think about Darwin's idea, survival of the fittest, think about what that really means. It means if you are a creature, you have two big important jobs ...

JAD: You gotta survive, and you gotta be fit, right? Whatever that means.

LYNN LEVY: Fitness really means how many babies can you make? How many babies are you making? And so if you do some stupid, you know, harebrained thing that means you can't stay alive and or you can't make babies, that doesn't make any sense.

JAD: Right.

OREN HARMAN: And yet, wherever you look in nature ...

LYNN LEVY: You see creatures doing this.

OREN HARMAN: From bacteria ...

LYNN LEVY:  ...to insects ...

OREN HARMAN:  ...birds, bees, ants and wasps, fish ...I'll give you an example. There's a species of amoeba called Dictyostelium Discoideum which—which usually, the amoeba sort of lives on its own, it's a single-celled organism in the forest. But when resources are low, what it does is, it sends out this chemical signal, and all the other amoebas, who were also single-celled ...

LYNN LEVY:  ...they start sending out signals.

OREN HARMAN:  ...and they start sort of crawling until they all meet. And they become one slug, which is now a single organism. 

LYNN LEVY: And this slug begins to sort of move along until it finds a place that's windy and sunny, at which point ... 

OREN HARMAN:  It stops. And the top 20 percent of the slug, the top 20 percent amoeba in the head of the slug, begin to create out of their own body a stalk, which hardens. And they die while doing so. But it—the stalk allows the bottom 80 percent to climb up the stalk, and to create an orb at the top of the stalk.

LYNN LEVY: And from there, all the amoebas that aren't, you know, dead, they can catch a wind ... 

OREN HARMAN: To better pastures.

LYNN LEVY: It's like a dandelion.

OREN HARMAN: So what's happened is, that the top 20 percent have really sacrificed themselves for the back 80 percent. And that's an amoeba. So you figure, what the hell is happening here? This was a great mystery to Darwin. And Darwin said, "This is in fact the greatest mystery, and the greatest riddle. And if I can't answer it, then my theory isn't worth anything."

LYNN LEVY: And for 100 years, when people talked about evolution, this thing altruism is the elephant in the room.

JAD: So we were curious about this.

CARL ZIMMER: Sorry, I'm ...

JAD: How might you take this elephant, this niceness thing that seems to be everywhere, and shove it back into the mean old theory of evolution? There's got to be a way. And so, we called up Carl Zimmer who's a journalist we have on the show quite often, who writes a lot about evolution. And he told us that in the 1960s, just as George Price was starting to ask these questions, some scientists came up with a new way of thinking about altruism. A thought experiment which he ran us through.

CARL ZIMMER: Okay, so—okay, so—so Robert, do you have siblings?

ROBERT: I have a sister.

CARL ZIMMER: Okay, you have a sister ...

ROBERT: Sarah. 

CARL ZIMMER: Okay, let's just imagine that you guys are, like, home from college, say.

ROBERT: Okay. 

CARL ZIMMER: And—and there's a flood at the Krulwich manor and the water is flooding around, and you can see that your sister is—is about to die.

VOICE: Help! Help me!

CARL ZIMMER: If you save your sister's life and you die in the process, your genes, Robert Krulwich's genes, are gone.

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: Right. This is the problem.

CARL ZIMMER: Yes. But you and your sister have the same parents.

ROBERT: Yes.

CARL ZIMMER: Okay. So your sister has 50 percent of your genes. Okay?

ROBERT: So if I rescue her, then half my genes survive.

CARL ZIMMER: Right. 50 percent move on. Now, if you had a sister and a brother and you saved them both, they each have 50 percent.

JAD: So it's a wash.

CARL ZIMMER: And so it's effectively, it's like—it's like saving Robert Krulwich in his entirety. ROBERT: Mathematically speaking.

CARL ZIMMER: Mathematically speaking. Right.

JAD: Can you do this with cousins?

CARL ZIMMER: Yeah, actually. If you step it back to cousins ...

ROBERT: What percentages are—that's a quarter in the case of the first cousins?

CARL ZIMMER: It's an eighth.

ROBERT: So I have to have eight first cousins to equal my full genome.

CARL ZIMMER: Right? Yeah.

JAD: Yeah. Do you have that many?

ROBERT: I have 32 third cousins. And that's why I always round them up in a rodeo every year. JAD: And you place them all together, just in case.

ROBERT: "You guys stay here in case something happens to me." 

JAD: But here's what I don't get, like, how does this actually operate? Like, Robert's not gonna sit there while the manor is flooding and be like, "Well, let's see. I have a cousin that's an eighth and a second cousin at the 32nd."

CARL ZIMMER: No. You understand the math has already been done.

JAD: The math has already ...

CARL ZIMMER: The math has been done by evolution on genes. And those are the genes you got.

JAD: Oh, so you're saying that the evolution has turned the math into an instinct?

CARL ZIMMER: Yeah, you got it.

ROBERT: I don't think I get it. Like, so what is the instinct here? The—I know I want to save my sister.

JAD: Yeah, well, so here's how I understand it. Since sis has half your genes ...

ROBERT: Yeah? 

JAD: And since a second cousin only has a 32nd, theoretically, your instinct to save your sis should be 16 times stronger than your instinct.

ROBERT: No, that's actually roughly proportionally correct, really. [laughs]

JAD: But keep in mind this was just an idea. It's just a thought experiment until our guy George Price comes along and writes an equation which shows mathematically how an instinct like this could evolve.

CARL ZIMMER: It's very powerful. Okay, so, well, do you want me to just read the letters?

JAD: Yeah.

LYNN LEVY: What is the equation? What equals what?

CARL ZIMMER: Okay, Okay. So it's a W X Delta Z = the covariance of WI, ZI + E. We call it EWI Delta ZI.

JAD: No, of course.

CARL ZIMMER: Yeah, there you go.

JAD: So complicated. I mean it was simple a second ago.

LYNN LEVY: No, it's—yeah, it sounds a little complicated. He's not just dealing with like a simple setup. It's like, he's got the traits and how they affect the different groups and how things change over time. So it's a big—there's a lot going on in there.

JAD: Okay. Yeah, do you understand what you just said?

LYNN LEVY: Not—nah.

KATHLEEN PRICE: Yeah. So here, this is a really interesting letter we should read.

CARL ZIMMER: When he did write the equation, he walked off the street into the University ...

KATHLEEN PRICE: University College of the University of London.

CARL ZIMMER: In London. Complete unknown, had just moved from America. No one knew who he was.

KATHLEEN PRICE: "I went to talk to a Professor Smith ..." 

CARL ZIMMER:  And he showed the equation to the professor and said, "Is this new?" 

KATHLEEN PRICE: "I felt sure that someone must have discovered it before."

CARL ZIMMER: The professor looked at it, and after a very, very short amount of minutes gave him an honorary professorship, keys and the keys to—to an office. One of the best genetics departments in the world.

LYNN LEVY: So George is sitting in his office, which by the way is on the site of Darwin's old house.

JAD: Whoa!

LYNN LEVY: Yeah. And he's made this big discovery and he's thinking. Thinking, thinking.

CARL ZIMMER: Thinking philosophically about what it all meant.

LYNN LEVY: Thinking. Thinking.

CARL ZIMMER: If I can write a formal mathematical treatment of the evolution of a trait like altruism, what it means about the trait is that the trait is never really purely altruistic. 

LYNN LEVY: If making a sacrifice helps me in the end or helps my genes ...

JAD:  Sort of like selfishness in disguise. 

LYNN LEVY: Yeah.

CARL ZIMMER: If that's true, the world is a terrible place because it means that there's no true—there could never be true selflessness in the world. My math means that there cannot ever be true selflessness and I can't accept a world like that.

JAD: Why could he suddenly not accept the world like that?

LYNN LEVY: I—yeah, I don't know. Oren thinks it might be because ...

OREN HARMAN: Precisely because he had been so selfish for most of his life. And so he decided in his own life to embark on a program of radical altruism, that would prove that there was true selflessness in this world. And that's what led him to the streets of London, in search of homeless people, derelicts, down and outs. And he began by sort of just walking up to them, introducing himself. "Hello, my name is George. What's your name? How can I help you?"

JAD: To random people on the street.

LYNN LEVY: Yeah.

KATHLEEN PRICE: "Everywhere I go, I keep running into down and out alcoholics, to whom I give if I have anything, and with whom I sit and drink from their bottle if they offer me a drink." OREN HARMAN: He'd buy people sandwiches, or give them a few pounds.

KATHLEEN PRICE: " ...whether it's by giving them money, cleaning a filthy kitchen ..." 

OREN HARMAN:  And then it got bigger.

LYNN LEVY: He started giving out keys to his place ...

OREN HARMAN:  ...inviting these guys into his home.

LYNN LEVY: People were coming and going, he was giving them food, clothes. And after a few months of charity like that, he was out of money.

OREN HARMAN: There was one letter that he had written to John Maynard Smith, another great biologist of the era, which said, "John, I'm down to my last 15p, and I can't wait to get rid of the last 15." He thought he was proving his equation wrong.

JAD: So by getting poorer and poorer, and giving away all this stuff, he was somehow negating the thing his math seemed to say was inevitable? The selfish instinct?

LYNN LEVY: Yeah, you know, he had this self-preservation instinct and he was going to fight the self-preservation instinct, and he was going to win. 

OREN HARMAN: Sort of beat the mathematics that he himself had written. 

LYNN LEVY: So he was approaching it almost like—like a math proof.  

OREN HARMAN: Yeah.

PRODUCER: Yeah, it's the red one that you'll be talking into.

LYNN LEVY: When he ran out of money, George moved out of his apartment and into this abandoned house in a part of London called Tolmers Square. 

SYLVIA: Which one does the volume for my headphones?

LYNN LEVY: Which is where he met Sylvia.

SYLVIA: It was rough. There were just—'cause they were just poles holding the walls up. Some—some places out walls.

LYNN LEVY: She was a young artist, also squatting at the time. 

SYLVIA: The buildings are crumbling, you know. People had made makeshift staircases ...

LYNN LEVY: And George had, like, a room?

SYLVIA: Well, a few clothes on the floor, not much. But you know, you could see he was always thinking. He would go around asking other people, "Does anybody have shoes they don't want? So and so needs a pair of shoes." You know, that would be part of it. But it might also be like, if somebody was sick, getting him to a doctor. Because if you didn't, if you were homeless, it's very hard to have a doctor. But like I said, all this is going on at the same time. He was getting thinner and thinner. Thin little neck, and then these clothes, that just hung around him.

LYNN LEVY: Hmm.

LYNN LEVY: He began writing letters to his daughters.

OREN HARMAN: Apologizing, weeping.

KATHLEEN PRICE: "Dear Annamarie, sorry I deserted you like that, and I'm sorry I was such a poor father to you."

OREN HARMAN: Yeah, I've been a terrible father.

KATHLEEN PRICE: Looking at your picture now makes me wish I could do it all over again. SYLVIA: Maybe where I come into the picture is he wanted to begin again.

LYNN LEVY: She says George asked her to marry him over and over.

SYLVIA: First, I thought it was kind of a joke, and I was saying, "George, we can't get married." You know ...

LYNN LEVY: She said no each time. And at a certain point, he gave up.

SYLVIA: It's hard to really remember, but it was colder as the—as the winter came on. You wouldn't see George as often. He became quieter, I think. Just remember—and quieter.

LYNN LEVY: One morning, this guy that was sharing a squat with George.

OREN HARMAN: His name is Shmuley Katir ...

LYNN LEVY: He was heading out the door. 

OREN HARMAN: He found beneath the door, as he was going out of the building, a letter. And since they were living in a squat, he was afraid that this was some kind of eviction notice or something like that. He didn't read English, he couldn't read English. So he ran up the stairs and knocked on George's door because George was the only one who could read English. And when he knocked, the door sort of kind of went in a bit, and he could see in the aperture that there was blood all over the linoleum floor. When he had enough of an opening, he could see that George was sitting there with no blood left in his body.

JAD: He killed himself?

LYNN LEVY: Yeah.

OREN HARMAN: He took a pair of scissors and cut through his carotid artery, which is a very, very sort of terrible death. Poor George.

JAD: Thanks to producer Lynn Levy. For more on George Price, be sure to read Oren Harman's book, The Price of Altruism. And thanks also to Carl Zimmer. His latest is Microcosm.

ROBERT: We'll be right back.

[ANNMARIE PRICE: Hi, this is Annmarie Price.]

[KATHLEEN PRICE: This is Kathleen Price. Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

[ANNMARIE PRICE: Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.]

[KATHLEEN PRICE: More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

[OREN HARMAN: This is Oren calling. Radiolab is produced by WNYC ...]

[CARL ZIMMER: And distributed by NPR. This is Carl Zimmer. Bye.]

 

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