Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - The Man who Solved Kindness

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

George Price is on a mission to prove that human kindness is real. He's seen the latest research suggesting any altruism is ultimately selfish and finds it deeply depressing. George decides to learn the mathematics he needs to prove that research wrong, and throws his career, and life, into the quest for complete kindness.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. long lost treasure chest. While you cook the lasagna. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover bestselling adventure stories on Audible. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster,

iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-iHeart. A warning before we start. This cautionary tale discusses death by suicide. If you're suffering emotional distress or you're having suicidal thoughts, support is available, for example from the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the US. Yes. Bill Hamilton is on his way to a funeral. We're in London. It's January 1975. Hamilton is an academic, obscure to the general public, but well on his way to becoming a superstar in his field. That field is evolution. Hamilton is a brilliant naturalist. Go with him on a walk and he'll tell you everything there is to know about every plant, bird and insect you encounter. Hamilton is also a highly original thinker. He'll later be described as the greatest Darwinian since Darwin himself.

Bill Hamilton can't help but feel a twinge of guilt about the death of the man whose funeral he's going to attend. Could he have done more to prevent it? In some ways, George Price had been a close and dear friend. He'd been staying at Hamilton's house just a couple of weeks before his death. In other ways though, how well had anyone known George Price really? Price had been a strange man, a very strange man indeed. Hamilton gets to the funeral service. There are only a handful of mourners. He recognises one, a fellow high-powered academic who works on evolution and game theory. The other mourners are entirely different. Ruddy-cheeked, shaggy-haired, wearing old and grubby clothes and smelling of urine.

They look like homeless drunks. That's because they are homeless drunks. But they're standing quietly in respectful mourning. Hamilton is moved by their obvious grief. These unfortunate people must have really loved George Price. What sort of life do you have to have lived to end up with a funeral attended by these two types of people? Distinguished academic scientists and homeless drunks. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. As a young man, Bill Hamilton was mystified by altruistic behaviour. Something that incurs a cost to you and benefits someone else. In human terms, altruism doesn't feel like

it ought to be much of a mystery. It's instinctive. It feels good to feed the hungry, give shelter to the homeless, lend our coat to someone who's cold. Asking why is liable to make you sound like a psychopath. The obvious explanation is that deep down in human nature, there must be something good and pure and noble. The better angels of our nature. We'd like to think so. But what about other kinds of animal? Here it starts to get easier to understand why altruism mystified Bill Hamilton. Take the ground squirrel for example. A bunch of squirrels are out foraging for nuts when a hawk appears in the sky. The squirrel who first spots the hawk instinctively squeaks out to alert the other squirrels who all scurry for cover. That alarm call is an act of altruism. The squirrel who calls out is attracting attention to herself.

As all the other squirrels dash for safety and the hawk looks to see where the squeak came from, the hawk is quite likely to come after her. If instead the squirrel had reacted by quietly finding cover herself, she'd be more likely to survive while the hawk attacked some other squirrel. So why doesn't she?

Maybe it's because deep down in squirrel nature there's something good and pure and noble. Maybe but it seems like a stretch. It's even more of a stretch when you get to another creature that can be surprisingly altruistic. The wasp. As an evolutionary biologist, Bill Hamilton worked mostly with mathematics. But he loved to get out in nature to study wasps. Or any kind of flying, crawling, buzzing, biting, stinging things. On field trips in tropical locations, Hamilton was notorious for seeking out random holes to plunge his hand into to investigate what exotic insects might be lurking inside.

Every time I turned round, recalled a colleague, he'd be climbing a tree or wading up a river. around, recalled a colleague, he'd be climbing a tree or wading up a river. During one expedition to Brazil, Hamilton spotted that an unfamiliar species of wasp had built a nest in the middle of a disused termite mound. He wanted to find out more about this species, so he dug a two metre tunnel to get into the nest from below. The worker wasps are extremely fierce, reported Hamilton, and leave their stings in human flesh like honeybees. They jet venom and this often reaches the eyes. I was incapacitated for two days after my first observation of this nest. Not that things like this put him off. By the end of his career, Hamilton reckoned he must have been stung by at least a thousand different species of wasp.

But all that lay ahead. As a young student at Cambridge University in the 1950s, Hamilton wanted to understand, in general terms, the altruism of worker wasps in some wasp species. They devote their lives to protecting their queen. Only the queen gets to breed. The workers never have offspring of their own. In evolutionary terms, it's quite the sacrifice. Why do the worker wasps do it? When young Hamilton asked his Cambridge professors that question, the professors didn't think it was a puzzle at all. They simply shrugged. Obviously the wasps are acting for the good of the species. And the squirrel who raises an alarm when a predator appears? Well, she's serving the group of squirrels to which she belongs, and that must help the

group to compete with other groups. That seemed like woolly thinking to Bill. He thought natural selection works on individuals, not groups or species. A squirrel who quietly hid when she saw a hawk would have a better chance of surviving than a squirrel who selflessly raised the alarm. It'd expect the genes for quiet hiding to spread, yet it was the genes for alarm raising that had won out. Why? out. Why? Hamilton was determined to solve the mystery. But he found it hard to get funding for postgraduate research when nobody else even agreed with him that there was any mystery to be solved.

Hamilton later recalled, At times I was sure I saw something that others had not seen. At others I felt equally certain that I must be a crank. How could it be that respected academics around me would not see the interest of studying altruism along my lines, unless it were true that my enterprise were bogus in some way, that was obvious to all of them, but not to me. Hamilton managed to find some funds and an academic to supervise his PhD, a mathematical geneticist at the Galton Laboratory in London. Not that even his supervisor really got what he was trying to achieve at first. Most of the time, Hamilton recalled, I was extremely lonely.

In the evenings, when London's libraries closed for the night, he couldn't face going back to his dingy rented room, so he sat on a bench in a railway station, just for the sense of having people around him while he scribbled equations in his notebook. Finally, Hamilton got his ideas in order. But who might be willing to publish them? He tried the prestigious journal Nature and got rejected out of hand. His supervisor reckoned his best chance was an obscure new publication, the Journal of Theoretical Biology. Hamilton sent his manuscript off. George Price had often seemed on the verge of achieving something brilliant, but somehow nothing ever quite worked out. Price got a degree in chemistry from the University of Chicago during the Second World War, and

went straight to work on the Manhattan Project, then Harvard, then Bell Labs. He wrote big think articles for popular magazines. One was about game theory and the nuclear threat from the Soviet Union. A publisher was impressed and offered George an advance to write a book. George took the money, but somehow never quite managed to finish the book. Another article imagined a futuristic design machine that might speed up invention. It looks a lot like what we'd now call computer-aided design. Was it really a practical possibility? Yes, said George. He followed up his magazine piece with a more detailed technical proposal based on existing IBM computers. The head of IBM's research

department was impressed and offered George a job. But IBM wouldn't categorically commit to making George's design machine, so George said no. He'd patent his idea himself. But he hadn't looked into patenting before he turned down IBM, and when he did, he discovered that he couldn't afford a patent lawyer. With George Price, nothing was ever straightforward. George married a devout Roman Catholic. He was an equally avid atheist. This isn't going to last, said George's friends. The couple had two daughters and argued about how to raise them.

His wife had been educated by nuns at Sacred Heart. George told her, I'd rather our daughters grow up to be prostitutes than nuns at Sacred Heart. George told her, I'd rather our daughters grow up to be prostitutes than nuns. His wife divorced him. George struggled to afford the alimony. Then there was George's health. Doctors found a tumour in his thyroid. It would have to come out. But the operation went wrong. It left him numb in parts of his face and with limited use of an arm. By 1967, George was 45 years old. His professional life had been a disappointment. His personal life a disaster.

But there was one bit of good news. He'd just won an insurance payout over his botched operation. He still felt sure he had some brilliant achievement within him. He decided on a fresh start. He'd moved to London and live on his insurance money while he took some time out to read. Surely he'd come up with some kind of brilliant idea about something. George wrote to his teenage daughters. I've seen quite a lot of London so far, including the British Museum Library, the Museum of Natural History Library, the University of London Library, the University College Library, the Well Historical Medical Library and Science and Technology Library. Soon I hope to visit the Royal College of Surgeons Library and Royal Zoological Society Library. In one of the libraries,

in an obscure publication called the Journal of Theoretical Biology, George Price happened upon an article by someone called Bill Hamilton. George was profoundly shocked. Surely Hamilton's ideas couldn't be right? We'll hear what those ideas were after the break. You sailed beyond the horizon in search of an island scrubbed from every map. You battled Krakens and navigated through storms. Your spade struck the lid of a long lost treasure chest. While you cooked a lasagna.

There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover best-selling adventure stories on Audible. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. If you wanted to understand Bill Hamilton's ideas, Bill Hamilton might have been the worst person to ask. Hamilton was an original thinker, but a terrible lecturer. Notorious for standing with his back to the audience, mumbling inaudibly while he scribbled equations on a blackboard.

Here's one description of a Hamilton performance. He lectured for a full 45 minutes without yet getting to the point. When he realised that he was five minutes over time and still had not gotten to the point, or indeed very near it, he asked if he could have some more time and called for slides. The room went dark and there was a rumble and a roaring sound as about 90% of the audience took this opportunity to exit the room for some fresh air. Some students were nearly trampled. Years later, another evolutionary biologist translated Bill Hamilton's ideas into understandable

language in a book that became a bestseller. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. This is what Bill Hamilton had realised. Behaviour that looks altruistic from the point of view of an individual can look self-interested from the point of view of a gene. Remember the noble squirrel who squeaks out a warning when she sees a predator? She puts herself at risk but gives the other squirrels a better chance of escaping. If she's related to those other squirrels, that means they're going to share some of her genes, including any genes that predispose her to squeak when she sees a predator. If the risk of raising the alarm is outweighed by the chance of saving enough related squirrels, the alarm-raising genes can spread.

It all came down to mathematics, about risks and costs and benefits, and degrees of genetic relatedness. Wasps can be related in unusual ways, with worker wasps sharing more genes with the offspring of their queen than they would with any offspring of their own. From the genes point of view, it makes perfect sense for the worker wasps to give up on reproducing themselves and help the queen to reproduce instead. Hamilton's paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology showed how a genes eye view could explain altruistic behaviour in a range of species. The squirrel and the wasps aren't acting for the good of the species or the good of the group. They're not acting

in their own individual interests either. Instead, they are playthings of their genes. When Charles Darwin published his Theory of Evolution in 1859, it shocked members of polite society. One much-repeated story has two upper-class ladies discussing Darwin's book. Mr. Darwin says we are descended from the apes, says one. Let us hope it isn't true. But if it is true, says the other, let us pray that it does not become generally known. Bill Hamilton's paper had much the same effect on George Price. Sitting in a library in London, Price thought about what Hamilton's ideas implied. If the self-interest of genes could account for altruistic seeming behaviour in wasps and squirrels, it might explain altruistic instincts in humans too.

Maybe deep down in human nature, there wasn't something good and pure and noble after all. The thought seemed deeply depressing to George Price. But it also seemed to Price that he'd found his opportunity to do something brilliant. He was going to prove Bill Hamilton wrong. There was just one problem. Price didn't know any of the necessary mathematics. But he had time on his hands. Maybe he could learn? In September 1968, George Price knocked on the door of the Galton Laboratory in London.

He didn't know anyone of the Galton Laboratory in London. He didn't know anyone at the Galton Laboratory, he just thought it would be the type of place that might contain someone who'd be able to understand what he'd been working on. Price said, I've got an equation I'd like to show someone. I think it might be important, but it's very simple. So simple, I find it hard to believe that nobody's discovered it before. That's why I want an expert to take a look. Have you got a mathematical geneticist I can talk to? Imagine how that must have looked.

An American man in his mid-forties with no relevant academic credentials, turns up brandishing an equation. What are the chances that it actually is important? And what are the chances that the man is a crank? But as it happened, the Galton laboratory did have a mathematical geneticist who'd be willing to see George Price, the professor who had once supervised Bill Hamilton. The professor looked at Price's equation. It was, indeed, simple. But, hmm, it was elegant. It was interesting. Very interesting. And no, the professor assured George, nobody had discovered it before. In fact, he'd never seen anything like it. He'd certainly like to see what you might be able to do with that equation.

On the spot, he offered George a job. George must have had mixed feelings. On the one hand, he now had an office and an income. This was wonderful and totally unexpected, he wrote home to his mother. On the other hand, he'd wanted to prove Bill Hamilton wrong, but the equation he'd discovered did quite the opposite. It showed that Hamilton's ideas were essentially correct. showed that Hamilton's ideas were essentially correct. From his new position at the Galton Laboratory, George Price sent his equation to Bill Hamilton. Hamilton was now working at a university's field station in the countryside outside London. He understood at once what Price had done, and was amazed by it.

Price had approached Hamilton's work using a branch of mathematics that Hamilton had never even considered. Because Price hadn't studied biology, he hadn't used the mathematical techniques which biologists learn. Instead, he tried to work everything out from first principles. He'd taught himself a mathematical approach called covariance analysis. The equation he'd come up with was a simple depiction of how a gene's prevalence changes from one generation to the next. It's not that Price had discovered something new exactly. He'd come up with a new way of looking at things. It was as if Bill Hamilton had scaled a mountain, and George Price had shown him

there was an easier way up the other side. A new road, wrote Hamilton, amid startling landscapes. Hamilton used Price's mathematics to reformulate all his results in a vastly more economical and appropriate way. He sent it off to Nature, the prestigious journal that had rejected his earlier paper. This time, they said yes. Price's mathematics were not only clearer, but more general. They helped to frame debate among biologists about cases where group selection might still play a role in evolution.

As they explored the implications of Price's equation, Bill and George became friends. It seemed to Bill, he wrote, that George was like his second self. On the face of it, George Price's fresh start in London had been an astonishing success. It wasn't just his equation. He tried applying ideas from game theory to evolution, just as he had once used them to analyse the threat from the Soviets, it turned out to be a rich source of insights. Other biologists started to get into game theory too. But with George Price, nothing was ever straightforward. One day George told Bill that he'd been thinking, how on earth had he come up with his equation? After all,

he said, when I came across your paper, I didn't know a covariance from a coconut. Yet somehow he'd taught himself just the right kind of mathematical technique to discover something that was simple and powerful, and that other brilliant minds had missed for decades. It was a miracle. Bill assumed that George must be talking figuratively. But no, George was deadly serious. Truly, it was a miracle. God had deemed that humans were ready to hear this truth about evolution and God had chosen him, George Price, to pass on this truth. George Price, the lifelong atheist, had found religion. He would now devote his life to doing whatever God wanted him to do. And what God wanted him to do, he decided, was be an altruist. The most extreme kind

of altruist you could possibly imagine. Cautionary Tales will driving closer to the truth. While curled up on the couch with your cat. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover heart pounding thrillers on Audible. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business?

Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-iHeart to get started. That's 844-844-iHeart. George Price had a vision of Jesus, in which Jesus said to him, Give to everyone who asks of you, and whoever takes away what is yours, do not demand it back. you, and whoever takes away what is yours, do not demand it back." Right, thought George. He began to seek out the seedier streets and squares of central London and introduce himself to homeless people. "'My name is George. Is there any way I can help you?'

"'Yes,' said some of those people. You can give me money. You can buy me a sandwich. You can invite me back to your home to sleep for the night. George did. And they stayed. And he gave them keys. Soon his flat was filled with homeless guests. Most were alcoholics.

Some had recently been released from mental asylums. Others were ex-convicts or on the run. George's friends were concerned. Don't worry, George told them. If I'm obeying Jesus, he will protect me from serious harm. When the lease on George's flat ran out, George's guests were homeless again, as was George. He'd been thinking he should probably rent somewhere else, somewhere bigger, but somehow he hadn't quite got around to it. He started sleeping in his office at the Galton laboratory, though he wasn't there much during the day, as he explained in a letter to his brother. "'A substantial amount of my time is given trying to help people in almost any way they

ask me,' wrote George. "'Whether it's by giving them money, cleaning a filthy kitchen, or trying to solve some mathematical problem for somebody here at work. Many times I find myself reduced to one penny, a half penny or zero. Most of my possessions have been given away, including my coat, but I'll have to pick up a coat somewhere now with winter coming on. In 1973, the prestigious journal Nature put on its front cover an article about game theory and evolution, co-authored by George and a colleague at the Galton laboratory.

It was quite a coup. But living at the Galton was becoming difficult. One of the people George was trying to help was a woman who wanted to hide from her abusive partner. Now the partner had turned up at the Galton, drunk and aggressive, yelling up at George's window, where is she? What have you done with her? The man smashed a bicycle lamp, grabbed someone's satchel and threw the papers over the pavement, then unzipped his trousers, he took a piss on the front steps. George wrote optimistically to his daughter, I expect that one cover illustrated article in Nature compensates for one urination at the entrance to the building. But George was overestimating the patience of the Galton.

They told him this had gone too far, he'd have to find somewhere else to sleep. He found a room in a squat in a derelict old building in central London. Gradually, he stopped going to the Galton at all. Bill Hamilton had shown how altruism could evolve among relatives. Now, another biologist, using game theory, showed how it could evolve among non-relatives too. But if you hope for something good and pure and noble in human nature, this new idea of reciprocal altruism wasn't going to help you. Broadly speaking, you do a favour for someone when they're in need, then they return the favour when you're in need. The evolution of friendship is firmly rooted in the self-interest of the genes. It was all a far cry from what the vision of Jesus had whispered to George,

give to everyone who asks of you, and whoever takes away what is yours, do not demand it back. That was pure altruism. But was it realistic? One of the former guests at George's flat didn't think so. Smokey had been in and out of prison 30 times. Now he was back in again. He wrote to George with some friendly advice. Stop going out on the streets to seek out homeless drunks. "'These people have no respect for you,' wrote Smokey. "'All they want is money and drink. You have to consider yourself now and again.'"

Smokey might not have studied game theory, but he clearly intuitively felt that George's altruism made no sense without the promise of reciprocity. Do they worry about you? He asked. When you're broken hungry? I doubt it very much. Give them half the chance and they would squeeze you dry. Smokey signed off this piece of wisdom with a request for cash when George replied. Tell her £15 if you can manage. Bill Hamilton lived in the countryside now, but he sought George out when he came to London. He was shocked. George was stick thin. His teeth were starting to rot.

Come and visit me, said Bill. George did. In December 1974, Bill showed him the papers he was working on, using George's covariance mathematics. Come back to work, said Bill. Let's do a project together. George seemed enthusiastic. Bill had flights booked with his wife to visit the in-laws for Christmas, but he made George promise to come back in January and stay again. Instead, Bill returned to a letter from the police in London. His name had been found on some papers, in a squat, left by a man who'd killed himself. A man called George Price. Bill went to collect the papers. He walked up the stairs in the derelict building

to the room where George had been living. A light bulb hung from the ceiling. The window was broken, patched up with brown tape. There was a mattress, cardboard boxes filled with papers, and dried blood on the floor. George Price had been deeply shocked by the idea that altruistic instincts might be explained by the self-interest of genes. Then he'd become a religious convert, apparently determined to prove that altruism can be good and pure and noble. It's impossible not to see a connection. Still though, George Price's story isn't quite that neat. His altruism was part of a wider mental breakdown. That's clear when you look at some of the other things George was convinced God wanted

him to do. To start with, marry the 18-year-old daughter of one of his old friends. When the horrified girl said no, he decided God wanted him to marry a woman he'd met once at a lecture. When she said no, and he persisted, and she told him never to contact her again, he warned her that the devil was leading her astray. Then George decided God wanted him to remarry his ex-wife, the mother of his daughters. He wrote her a letter to propose, I can understand if you don't want to have anything to do with me. I'm not in very good condition physically. My financial condition is rather uncertain. On the positive side,

you would find me much kinder than before." As George increasingly spiralled, he decided to stop taking his medication, the medication he needed to replace the thyroid hormone, since it had his thyroid removed. He reasoned that if God still had plans for him, God would find a way to get the medication into him. George collapsed and was taken to hospital. By the time he woke up, a doctor had run tests and given him the medicine he needed. To George, it seemed like a miracle. Shortly before his death, George stopped taking his medicine again. Perhaps that was another test, and perhaps this time, he concluded that God was choosing not to intervene. George Price was killed by his mental illness, not his mathematics. But it isn't hard to see why Price thought there was something

dark about what his own equation helped to prove. When we feel an instinct to feed the hungry, give shelter to the homeless, or lend our coat to someone who's cold. Maybe that's not the better angels of our nature talking. It's our selfish genes, shaped by untold generations of helping our distant cousins or having our favours repaid. But is the idea really that depressing? Evolution, after all, has given us something else. Rational minds. We can use our rational minds to transcend our selfish genes. We can think our way to being good and pure and noble, if we choose, can't we? In the next episode of Cautionary Tales, the moral philosophers get involved, and we meet

an altruist who might be even more extreme than George Price, though in a very different way. For a full list of our sources, please see timharford.com Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Vines and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by Carlos Sanjuan at Brain Audio. Ben Nadaf Haferi edited the scripts. The show features the voice talents of Melanie Gutridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembra, Sarah Jupp, Marceya Monroe, Jamal Westman and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Sarah Nix,

Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Keira Posey and Owen Miller. Portionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It really makes a difference to us. And if you want to hear the show ad free, sign up to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. This is an iHeart Podcast.