Free The Price of Altruism by Oren Harman

Prologue
     
    T he men ducked out of the rain into the modest Saint Pancras Cemetery chapel. It was a bleak London day, January 22, 1975. The chapel was spare, its simple pews and white ceiling and walls giving it the feel of a rather uninspiring classroom. Soon they’d follow the hearse down a short path to the burial plot on East Road, where in an unmarked grave the body of the deceased would be laid to rest. 1
    A middle-aged man with a scraggly beard shuffled through the heavy wooden door beneath the ragstone spire, his nose red from whiskey and eyes swollen from fatigue. He’d been in and out of prison, destitute, hard on luck. A big toe jutted from torn sneakers, its nail uncut and covered in grime. Life had not smiled on Smoky. The only person who’d ever truly cared for him was George.
    The bearded man was followed into the chapel by four other homeless men, the dead man’s final companions, all bundled up in discarded sweaters and scarves found in trash-bins and at the shelters—too small, belonging once to unknown strangers, but welcome protectors from the bitter cold. Some wore belts and socks that George had kindly given them, others pants and overcoats for which he had generously provided the coin. He’d been a true saint, one of them muttered, holding back tears as he passed a few solitary University of London geneticists sitting uncomfortably in silence. A distinct stench of urine followed the ragtag party as it made its way toward the front of the chapel where the coffin lay. There were ten people in the room, maybe eleven. It was a glum ending to a glum affair. 2
    And there, at the front of the chapel, stood the world’s two premier evolutionary biologists, brilliant men and silent rivals. “George took his Christianity too seriously,” said Mr. Apps, administering the ceremony on behalf of Garstin Funeral Directors in the absence of any family. “Sort of like Saint Paul,” Bill Hamilton whispered audibly under his breath, forcing John Maynard Smith to bite his lip. Then there was a silence. George Price had come over from America to crack the problem of altruism and uncovered something terrible. Now he was dead, the victim of his own hand. 3
     
     
    From the dawn of time mankind has been contemplating virtue. It began with an act of trickery: “…then your eyes shall be opened,” the snake whispers to Eve in the Garden of Eden, coaxing her to eat of the fruit, “and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” But if judgment had replaced innocence by way of conniving, it didn’t take long before the hard questions arrived. Soon Cain rose up against his brother Abel, killing him to tame his envy. When the Lord came asking for Abel’s whereabouts, Cain answered: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” It was a question that would reverberate down the paths of history, becoming a haunting companion to humanity. 4
    Then came Darwin.
    The devout believed that morality was infused from above on the Sixth Day, religious skeptics that it had been born with philosophy. Now both would need to reexamine their timelines. “He who understands baboon,” the sage of evolution scribbled in a notebook, fore-shadowing what was to come, “would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” 5
    It was like confessing a murder. If, as the Scottish geologist James Hutton wrote toward the end of the eighteenth century, the earth was so ancient that “we find no vestige of a beginning—no prospect of an end” if, as Darwin himself argued, life on earth had evolved gradually, over eons, and, far from a ladder was more like a tree; if, just like muscles and feathers and claws and tails, behavior and the mind had been fashioned by natural selection—if all these were true, it would be inconceivable to continue believing that man’s defining feature was entirely unique. Whether life had been “originally breathed…into a few forms or one” by a Creator, as Darwin suggested, bowing before popular sentiment in the