Genetics, God and antlers

‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.’ Oren Harman uses this quote from Immanuel Kant to open one of the chapters of The Price of Altruism, and it’s an observation that — after the steady reflection on moral law that Harman’s book invites and encourages — only seems more true by the end.

‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.’ Oren Harman uses this quote from Immanuel Kant to open one of the chapters of The Price of Altruism, and it’s an observation that — after the steady reflection on moral law that Harman’s book invites and encourages — only seems more true by the end.

The title is a slightly cheesy three-way pun. This is the biography of a groundbreaking American theorist of altruism, George Price, who died in 1975 and lies in an unmarked and unvisited grave in St Pancras Cemetery in London. It is an account of the terrible toll his personal dedication to goodness took on him. And it also refers to the way in which loving thy neighbour can be coldly costed in terms of genetic advantage.  

At its core is the startling degree to which purely mathematical models are able to predict animal and even human behaviour: what Price will be remembered for is the formulation of an equation that accounts for altruism in terms of natural selection. So as well as being a biography, Harman’s book serves as an effective primer on the history of population genetics and its relation to theories of morality.

The basic question is: why, if natural selection makes paramount the survival of your own genes, do we see instances throughout nature of animals forgoing advantage for the good of family, tribe or even apparent strangers.