Radiolab - The Good Show

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

The standard view of evolution is that living things are shaped by cold-hearted competition. And there is no doubt that today's plants and animals carry the genetic legacy of ancestors who fought fiercely to survive and reproduce. But in this hour that we first broadcast back in 2010, we wonder whether there might also be a logic behind sharing, niceness, kindness ... or even, self-sacrifice. Is altruism an aberration, or just an elaborate guise for sneaky self-interest? Do we really live in a selfish, dog-eat-dog world? Or has evolution carved out a hidden code that rewards genuine cooperation?Sign up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail] support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Oh, wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y.

C. See? Yeah. This is Radio Lab. I'm Lathif Nassar. It's the holidays. And as usual at this time of year, everyone's become so nice all of a sudden. Giving gifts, donating to charities, showing up with a plate of cookies. Everything feels so warm and gooey and selfless.

But where is all of this goodness coming from? This week, we're bringing back an episode from 2010 that asks a simple question. Why do we sometimes help others even when it hurts us to do so? It feels like the right episode for right now, not because it's a holiday story, although there is a little Christmas parable in there. But because it asks what generosity is, where it comes from, and whether it truly exists at all, here it is the good show.

All right. Okay, so let's just do the open. All right. Hey, I'm Chad Aboumrod. I'm Robert Crillowicz. This is Radio Lab. And today we're going to be talking, well, let's do it this way. Which way?

I was at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, big gathering spot. for cool people with new books. And that particular week is Richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins. They like him. Don't make it so easy for him. I decided to begin. This is a real problem for a lot of people.

By quoting him to him. 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 this 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. Darwin was worried by the same thing. I mean, Darwin recognized 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 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 cheetahs. But they are the end products

of a sort of evolutionary arms race in which thousands, millions of animals have died. The shaping, 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 helped them to escape. So the sheer number of deaths that lie behind the sculpting of these beautiful creatures is horrifying and at the same time it's got a kind of savage beauty.

Wow. Why did you blame this exactly? Well, because I was sitting there thinking I know did 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 had something to do with an act of kindness? I can't imagine. So you're thinking that maybe it's not just meanness that can sculpt, but maybe niceness can sculpt, too. Exactly.

Niceness as a scalpel. Niceness as a scout. Ooh. 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 Radio Lab.

Goodness. Kindness. Selflessness. Altruism. If the world is so cruel, how do you account for it? Yeah. How should we think about it? And when you do see generaism.

How do you know it's really generous? 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, Warren Harmon, who wrote a book called The Price, as in George Price of altruism. You know, this is a high school photo. So, okay, so the people on the radio can't see the picture. So describe what he looks like. Well, I tell you, he looks a bit like sort of some kind of Scandinavian prince in the 17th century.

Good looking guy. Totally. Definitely something about this guy's eyes. His eyes. Yeah. 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. You could start George's story anywhere, but let's start in 1943. George graduates from college, and he's this... Very kinetic kind of guy. Really athletic. He'd swim in the surf, and he did a lot of rock climbing. And by all accounts, he was... Incredibly brilliant.

And right after college, he starts to kind of bounce through history. He was all over the place. First place he ends up is... The Manhattan Project on uranium enrichment. So he was working as a chemist on the atom bomb. When he was done with that, after a couple of years, 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. Meaning cancer. And I remember going to his lab, laying height and seek, all these bottles and teps tubes. By this time, George had a wife and two kids.

You look under the microscope. but slides of blood. Anna and Kathleen, but he never really saw them that much. He'd worked 56 hours straight without sleeping on benzogen. And I remember he was always gone a lot. When the kids were still pretty young. We were like five and six.

He left his family. Yeah. Just left. 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. What do you think it was driving him to keep moving from thing to thing?

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. So that's George. Wow. Quite a guy.

Very interesting guy. So what happens next? So next, what happens is he gets on a boat, and he goes to London. When was this, by the way? It's November, 1967. And in London, that's where things, for our purposes, start to really happen. Boy, what happens in London?

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... Why family? Like, why do people have families? Well, like, why do families stick together?

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. You know, go it alone. Like he had. And yet, family persists. And there should be a good reason for it. He even wrote about the question to his daughter. 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. 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? Huh. Well, what do you mean? 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. You've got to survive and you've got to be fit. Right. Whatever that means.

Fitness really means how many babies can you make? How many babies are you making? And so if you do some stupid, you know, hairbrained thing, that means. you can't stay alive and or you can't make babies, that doesn't make any sense. Right. And yet, wherever you look in nature. You see creatures doing this. From bacteria to insects.

Birds, ants, and wasps, fish. I'll give you an example. There's a species of amoeba called discotelium, discoidium, 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 amoeba who are also single-celled

they start sending out signals and they start sort of crawling until they all meet and they become one slug which is now a single organism and this slug begins to sort of move along until it finds a place that's windy and sunny at which point

it stops and the top 20% of the slug the top 20% 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 the stalk allows the bottom 80% to climb up the stalk and to create an orb at the top of the stalk.

And from there, all the amoeba that aren't, you know, dead, they can catch a wind. to better pastures. It's like a dandelion. So what's happened is that the top 20% have really sacrificed themselves for the back 80%. 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. And for a hundred years, when people talked about evolution, this thing, altruism, is the elephant in the room.

So we were curious about this. Sorry, I'm... 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. Okay, so, okay, so Robert, do you have siblings? I have a sister. Okay, you have a sister. Sarah. Okay, let's just imagine that. You guys are like home from college, say.

Okay. And there's a flood at the Kralwich Manor. And the water's flooding around, and you can see that your sister is about to die. If you save your sister's life and you die in the process, your genes, Robert Krollovich's genes are gone. Yep. Right, this is the problem. Yes.

But you and your sister have the same parents. Yes. Okay. So your sister has 50% of your genes. So if I rescue her, then half my genes survive? Right, 50% move on. And if you had a sister and a brother, and you saved them both,

you'd each have 50%. So it's a watch. And so effectively, it's like saving Robert Krollich in his entirety. Mathematically speaking. Mathematically speaking, right. Can you do this with cousins? Yeah, actually.

If you step it back to cousins... What percentage is... That's a quarter in the case of the first cousins? That is... It's an eighth. So I have to have eight cousins. First cousins to equal my full genome. Right. Yeah.

Do you have that many? I have 32 third cousins, and that's why I always round them up in a rodeo every year. And you place them all together. You guys stay here in case something happens to me. But here's what I don't get. Like, how does this actually operate? Like, Robert's not going to 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 that's a 32nd.

No, you understand. The math has already been done. The math has already been done by evolution on genes. And those are the genes you've got. Oh, so you're saying that evolution has turned the math into an instinct. Yeah, you got it. I don't think I get it. What is the instinct here?

I know I want to save my sister. Yeah, well, so here's how I understand it. Since cis has half your genes, and since second cousin only has a 32nd, theoretically, your instinct to save your cyst should be 16 times stronger than your instinct to say it. No, that's actually roughly proportionally correct. Really? 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. It's very powerful. Okay, so, well, do you want me to just read the letters? Yeah. What is the equation?

What equals what? Okay. Okay, so it's, uh, uh, W times delta Z equals the covariance of WI, comma, ZI, plus E, we call it E, WI, Delta, Z, I. Oh, of course. Yeah. There you go. It's so complicated.

I mean, it was simple a second ago. 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. Okay. Yeah.

All right. Do you understand what you just said? Not, no. So here, this is a really interesting letter. When he did write the equation, he walked off the street into the university. In University of College of the University of London. In London, complete unknown, had just moved from a world. America. No one knew who he was.

I went to talk to a professor Smith. And he showed the equation to the professor and said, is this new? I felt sure that someone must have discovered it before. The professor looked at it and after a very, very short amount of minutes gave him

an honorary professorship and the keys to an office. One of the best genetics departments in the world. So George is sitting in his office, which, by the way, is on the site of Darwin's old house. Whoa.

Yeah. And he's made this big discovery, and he's thinking. Thinking. Thinking. Thinking philosophically about what it all meant. Thinking. 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 that the trait

is never really purely altruistic. If making a sacrifice helps me in the end or helps my genes... Sort of like selfishness in the skies. Yeah. 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. Why could he suddenly not accept a world like that? Yeah, I don't know. Orrin thinks it might be because... 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 out. 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? To random people on the street? Yeah. Everywhere I go, I keep running into down and out alcoholics. To whom I give when I have anything and with whom I sit and drink from their bottle if they offer me a drink. He'd buy people sandwiches or give them a few pounds.

Whether it's by giving them money, cleaning a filthy kitchen. And then it got bigger. He started giving out keys to his place. writing these guys into his home. 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. 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. Huh. He thought he was proving his equation wrong. 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?

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. To sort of beat the mathematics that he himself had written. So he was approaching it almost like a math-proof. Yeah. When he ran out of money,

George moved out of his apartment and into this abandoned house in a part of London called Tolmer Square. Which one does the volume from my headphones? Which is where he met Sylvia? It was rough. They were just, because they were just poles holding the walls up. Some places had walls.

She was a young artist, also squatting at the time. And the buildings were crumbling, you know. People had made makeshift staircases. And George had, like, a room? 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 say all this is going on

at the same time he was getting thinner and thinner the sin little neck and these clothes that just hung around him he began writing letters to his daughters apologizing weeping

fear and reap I'm sorry I deserted you like that, and I'm sorry I was such a poor father to you. I've been a terrible father. Looking at your picture now makes me wish I could do it all over again. Maybe where I come into the picture is he wanted to begin again. She says George asked her to marry him over and over. First, I thought it was kind of a joke. I was saying, George, we can't get married.

She said no each time, and at a certain point, he gave up. It's hard to really, really remember, but it was colder. As the winter came on, you wouldn't see George as often. I became quieter, I think. I just remember, I'm quieter. One morning, this guy that was sharing a squat. with George. Name is Shmuli Katia.

He was heading out the door. He found beneath the door, as he was going out of the building, he found beneath the door 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 he killed himself yeah he took a pair of of scissors and cut through his carotid artery which is a very very sort of terrible death poor George Thanks to producer Lynn Levy. For more on George Price, be sure to read Oren Harmon's book, The Price of Altruism.

And thanks also to Carl Zimmer. His latest is Microcosm. We'll be right back. Hey, this is Radio Lab. Ron. I'm Robert Krollwich. Our topic today is. Goodness. Goodness, selflessness. So we've done the math. The math leaves me a little on the cold side. I wonder why. So you know what, forget the math. Forget the math. Let's go to the people who do the deeds. People who do amazingly brave and heroic things. Yeah. No math required. Maybe find out, I don't know.

What makes them different than the rest of us? Yeah. That question let us. Walter Rukowski. To a guy named Walter Rikowsky. And I'm the executive director and secretary of the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission. Cool. Well, thanks for doing this. Okay.

Can you just give us a little background on the Hero Fund? What is the Carnegie Hero Fund? The Carnegie Hero Fund is a private operating foundation that was established by Andrew Carnegie in 1904. And what we do is recognize civilian heroism throughout the United States and Canada by giving an award called the Carnegie Medal and accompanying the Carnegie Medal is a financial grant. How much?

Currently, the amount is $5,000. Wow. And how do you guys choose your heroes? We judge the heroic acts against a list of requirements. So then you have to have some kind of definition of hero, which includes some and excludes others. Yes.

Perfect. A basic definition, which is a civilian, one, meaning no military, who voluntarily leaves a point of safety to risk his own life or her own. life four to an extraordinary degree five to save or to attempt to save the life of another human six and how about seven why can you hear can you read that one more time okay i wasn't reading that just came from memory so that what is it that happens in a person's mind at that pivotal moment when they

decide to voluntarily leave a point of safety and risk their life to an extraordinary degree to save the life of another human that's what we wanted to know should we just jump in okay so the first one we have on our list is a Laura Shrake. Okay. That's file number 73546 and the award number is 8,0005. I am Laura Shrake. I'm from Mattoon, Illinois and I currently live in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Oh wow. Laura spoke with our producer Tim Howard. Okay, so we're going back a little bit here. Yeah, 15 years. Back in the mid-90s. 1995. He was a 21-year-old college student. And I was driving through the country, and I saw a woman getting mauled by a bull in a pasture. So she stopped to see what was going on.

Jumped out and started yelling at her to see what I could do. The woman was on the ground, and the bull was... 950-pound Jersey bull. Tossing her in the air and back on the ground. She was clearly struggling. And where were you? I was right on the other side of the fence, but the fence was electric. So here's the moment that we find fascinating.

At this point, Laura can either go forward through thousands of volts of electricity toward an angry bowl that will likely mall her too, or she can stay safe. I went ahead and just climbed through the fence. And I don't remember ever feeling the electricity. She says by the time she got through. A neighbor had shown up and threw her a piece of pipe.

Maybe about two feet long. So she approached the woman who was still conscious. The whole time she's yelling at me, hit the bull in the face as hard as you can and don't stop. So Ms. Shrake went up to the bull and beat it repeatedly with this two-foot length of tubing. I think it distracted the bull enough where she was able to get out from under him. and as soon as we were outside the fence, looking back into the pasture, the bull was literally right there at the fence. Kick the ground a few times and snorted.

He was not happy. To our question. When you were there at that fence and you had the choice to either stay put or to go through it, what was going through your mind? Was there a calculation there? No, I can't really say that, I mean. You didn't weigh your options or anything like that? I did not, no.

It was just, here's the problem, here's what I need to do, and something needed to happen. Huh. So there's no choice moment? Not that I recall. No. If nobody came to this woman's rescue, she would die. Unfortunately, this is the usual explanation, says Walter. No explanation.

I couldn't stand there and not do anything. I was compelled to act. I didn't really take the time to think about what else could happen. I can't say I ever really thought of my own life at that time. Okay, we just jumped ahead because we thought we'd try again. That's the voice of the next Carnegie hero that Walter told us about. Yeah, William David Pennell. Who is the 8,362nd person to receive the Carnegie Medal.

Our producer Lynn Levy tracked him down. Bill, can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. William David Pennell, who was 37 years old at the time, of his heroic act. Was it 1999? Yes. It was early in the morning.

It was like 3.19 a.m. in a small town near Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Monongahela, Pennsylvania. We was in bed sleeping, and my wife heard a lot of crash. I actually didn't hear it. And my one dog was carrying on, so right away, I run down there. Mr. Pennell went outside his house.

There was a very bad automobile accident. A car crashed head on into a utility pole. Flames was like rippling up the windchings. out from under the hood. And he responded to the scene, wearing only sweatpants. No shoes or shirt or not on it. Bare chested and bare foot. So here we are.

Bill's standing in front of this ball of fire. There are three drunk teenagers inside that car, though he doesn't know it. He can either, A, do nothing, or B, go in. Through the driver's door. And his big fella slumped out of the door, So I reached in and grabbed the hold of them.

Around the chest, pulled him from the driver's seat out to the ground. In the meantime, the car was just, like, blazing. And my neighbor was there. She was hollering. There's more of them in there. So I run back to the vehicle. Found that the front seat passenger was trapped in the wreckage. I finally got him loose and pulled him out.

Apparently, Mr. Pennell was aware that a third person was in the car, a third young man. Mr. Pennell entered the car a third time. By then... There was tires blowing at. Flames had grown to about three feet above the car's roof. The interior, like the headliner of the car and stuff, was dripping, like, plastic down on my back. I mean, I'm in there screaming.

You know, somebody gave me a hand in here. But nobody would help. And I reached in and grabbed the hold of the kid that was in the back by the scruff of the neck and pulled him out. All right, so when you were coming out of your house and you're looking at that car, going through your head? Well, just trying to

try to help. I mean, I did what any normal person would do. I mean, you know, I just kept saying, this is somebody's kids, you know what I mean? At the time, my daughter was like 16. And I'm saying to myself, you know, if something, God forbid, whatever happened to her, that I would hope someone

would be there to help. Did you ever talk to your neighbors and ask them why they didn't come in there? You know what? It's funny you brought that up because no, I've never, never brought it up, never brought it up. How come? I don't know. I guess, maybe I probably wouldn't like their answer.

I don't know. I don't know why I've never asked them out. What do you think is the difference between you and those other people who just sort of stood by? I couldn't answer that. I couldn't answer that. So are bullgirls she didn't know? This guy didn't really know either. somebody must be able to tell us something about what they were thinking at that moment that allowed them, that gave them the courage to do what they did. I can't give you a definite answer as to what propels people to do this, no.

But we took one more shot with Walter, and he told us about a case that of all the cases he's heard, this is the one that puzzles him the most. It's the case of Wesley James Autry, a construction worker from New York, 50-year-old man, who did jump into the, track bed in a subway station to remove a fellow, a young man who had fallen onto the track.

The gentleman was six foot, 180 pounds. He was inert, and yet Mr. Autry persisted despite the fact that a train was coming. There would come a point, at least in my estimation, where you would have to say, I have to get out of here because I'm going to be killed. I'm not suicidal. But Mr. Autry didn't think that way, he and I part in this manner. What he did was he lay atop the victim between the rails while the train passed over them. In the farthest reaches of my imagination, I can see myself jumping onto a subway track to attempt the rescue. What I can't see myself doing is lying atop the victim while the train passes over me. Making this story even more nuts?

When we finally met up with Wesley Autry on the platform where this incident happened, under 35th and Broadway, he explained to us that his daughters had been with him. How old were your daughters? At that time, my daughter was four and six and just them there. Show us a picture. Oh, my God. Super cute. The one behind me is Shuki and this is the baby Sashi.

So when they're standing there and this guy starts convulsing and then eventually falls off the platform onto the tracks right as a train is coming. His choice is pretty stark. In order to save this complete stranger, he's got to leave his daughters behind, potentially without a dad. I'm looking at him shaking and going into another seizure for some strange reason.

A boy's out of nowhere sick. Don't worry about your own to worry about your daughters. You can do this. So he jumps, runs to the guy. Is he conscious? No, no. Tries to grab the guy's hand. And he's time I grab this.

hand we'll slip apart and when he slip I look up the train that's getting closer I grab his hand again we'll slip apart the train is closer 50 feet 20 feet 10 feet and then it's right there and all he can do is grab the guy get him in a bear hug and flatten his body against the guy as much as he can the first train car just grazed my cats train car went right over them when the train came to a stop, four to five cars passed over us. I looked him in the eye, I said, excuse me, you seem to have a seizure or something,

that I don't know you, you don't know me. So I just kept talking to him until he came through. And he was like, well, where are we? I'm like, we're only for train. He said, well, who are you? I said, I came down to save your life. So he kept asking me, are we dead? Or we're in heaven?

I gave him a slight pinch on his arm. He said, oh, I said, see, you're very much alive. Have you? Did you ever ask yourself at this way, like, what am I doing here? I mean, he asked it, what am I doing here? Well, I can hear the two ladies. We had my daughter standing in between their legs. I can hear my daughter screaming.

So when that train come to a stop, I yelled up from underneath the train. Excuse me, I'm the father. We're okay. I just want to let my daughters know that I'm okay because I know that they are worried about me. Everybody start clapping. Can I ask you a question? So the point at which you said you heard a voice,

yes that said I can do this I can do this what's what is amazing to me is it you left your daughters right here and died after a guy you don't know he was a stranger total stranger but you know what the mission wasn't come completed I was chose for that you felt chosen like you were chosen I felt like I was the chosen man but for a religious person though I would wonder why me well you know what Maybe 20 years ago, I was supposed to be at a certain point. And then he explained to us exactly why he had jumped. He was the one guy who could.

He said right before his feet left the platform, this one specific moment from his life flashed to mind. This thing that happened, you know, I had a gun pulled to my temple, but, you know, it was a misfire. So, you know. A gun was put to your head and missed. So you were almost dead for a second or two? I was almost dead. You know, so you think you might have been spared for a purpose. I was spared for a reason.

After that moment, he says when the gun went click and he didn't die, he always wondered, why had God spared him that moment? Until he was on the platform and he saw the guy fall off. He says then he knew, this is why. I can do this. He was just, I can do this. I can do this. That voice, when that boy said that you're going to be okay,

I knew everything was going to work out. You know what I think at the end of the day? What's that? I don't think that there's an answer to the question we asked. A hero question? Why were you a hero? I don't think that any three of these heroes. I mean, the last one had the longest explanation.

He had been selected for some purpose. But does he know why he was chosen? Not a clue. See, the guy number three gives me something. What does he give you? Okay, so the first two, right? They have no idea. None.

So there's just something in them that made them act. But guy number three is talking about circumstances. The world prepared him for that moment. Serendipity. So it makes me think, well, what if circumstances are just right? Maybe any of us could do that. I get a mailman. He used to say to me all the time, he says,

how did you manage to do that up there? How did you manage to pull him kids out? I don't know if I could have done that. I said, well, you know what? Don't say you wouldn't do this or you wouldn't do that, to you're put in that situation. In fact, when we asked Walter, how many nominations do you get to hear?

Are they hard to find? No, they are not hard at all to find. We are fortunate to be living in a society, regardless of what you hear elsewhere, we are fortunate to be living in a society where people do look out for others, even strangers. He told us they've even had to up their guidelines to make it harder to win.

Simply because of the vast number of heroic deeds that happen in day-to-day life. Hey, this is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krillowicz. Oh. Yes, would you like to say our topic, Robert? Our topic today is goodness. Niceness.

Or may altruism, would be another bigger, fatter word. Yep. Thus far, we've met a couple of folks, individuals who have struggled with altruism in some way. Now we're going to sort of pull back and go from specifics to grand global strategy. Yes. Hello. Hello, hello. And we're going to tell you a really cool story, we think, that begins with this guy. My name is Robert Axelrod. I'm the Walgreen Professor for the Study of Human Understanding in the Department of Political Science and the Ford School of Public Policy of the University of Michigan. I know that's a mouth fair.

That was like your dean was like looking over here to say it all, please, say it all. Well, you know, you could just say I'm a professor of public policy and political science or something. Well, but before he was all of that, Axelrod, when he was in high school, he was one of those guys who just loved computers. Well, yes, in 59, 1960. I hung around the Northwestern University Computer Center. 5960, so were those large pieces of furniture

in refrigerated buildings? They were. In fact, the whole campus had one computer, and they let me use it for 15 minutes here and 15 minutes there. And what would you do with the computer? What I did, I did a very simple computer simulation of hypothetical life forms and environments for a science project. Ah, really? Yeah.

You're a pre-geek, is what you are. Yes. Before the word had been invented. I think you could say that. But then, in 1962, when Axelrod was down in a computer basement, I guess, somewhere, all over the world, everybody else was watching one of the great dramas in modern times. Good evening, my fellow citizens, unfold.

The Cuban missile crisis. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. And Axelrod started thinking about the dilemma we were in. Well, each side wants to spend more money buying missiles and things. You know, we could build more bombs, but then they could build more bombs. It would be better if they would both stop,

but if we stop and they don't... That would be bad. Very bad. Yeah, and so I was interested in what were the conditions that would allow people to get out of this problem. And then he starts thinking, well, wait, maybe I could use my... computer to help me figure out what's a good strategy for this. For something like the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Well, yes, right. And what made you think that computers could help with that? Well, I came across a simple game called The Prisoner's Dilemma. Yeah, where'd you'd like? Okay, so the Prisoner's Dilemma is a very famous thought experiment. It's a little tricky to describe, but I got a friend of mine, Andrew Zolle, who's written about the prisoner's dilemma in an upcoming book. Resilience, the science of why things bounce back. bounce back.

I got him to lay it out for me. What is the prisoners in lima? So imagine that two bank robbers are hanging out across the street from the first national bank. And the police pick them up. They've received a tip that these two guys are about to rob the bank. Got it? Yep. So the cops take these two guys back to the station, do the whole law and order thing, put them in different rooms.

And they walk into each one, let's call them Lucky and Joe. And they say to Lucky, we have enough to make sure that you go away for a six-month sentence. But this is not really what the cops want. They want a longer sentence for one of these guys, so they make Lucky an offer. If you, Lucky, rat out Joe, and Joe doesn't say anything, you will go free, and Joe will go to jail for 10 years. If the reverse happens... Meaning if you say nothing and Joe rats you out? You're going to jail for 10 years, and he's going to walk free.

If you both end up ratting on each other, you both get five. Five years. Whereas if you both keep your mouth shut? You're each going to jail for six months for loitering. So somehow, if Lucky and Joe could talk to each other, they both say don't speak. Absolutely. But the big problem that Lucky and Joe have is they can't talk to each other. All right, so you're lucky, okay?

What do you do? Do you rat Joe out or not? Do I know this guy? Uh-uh. At all? I mean, you met for this one job, but tomorrow you'll never see him again. Ever. Ever.

Well, like, if I knew him and I could trust him, then I think I know what I would do. You'd keep him out shut, because he'd keep his mouth shut. It would be a sweet thing. Indeed. But, see, since I don't know, I might as well, what would happen if he rats me out? You'd go to jail for ten years. He'd go free, that bastard. Ten years.

Yeah. But if I rat him out, in the world. The worst I get is... Five years. Or, you know, I go way free. I'm totally free. Do it, Crow. Say what's in your heart.

I'm going to... I'm throwing him under the bus, Jay. Yes, throw him under. What's his name again? Joe. Joe. You see he's already gone. I'm sorry.

You already remember him. You're dead to me, Joe. So you see, in this type of scenario where you don't know the guy, you have a very strong incentive. To rat the other guy out. Or, as the social scientists would say, to defect. That's right. If you play it only once.

If you only meet somebody once, whatever the other guy does, you're better off defecting against them. Just here on out, whenever you hear the word defect, know that it means screw the other guy over. But the really interesting stuff happens if you play over and over again, if you're going to meet the same people again. Because now you're thinking, should I help this guy out the next time? If he screwed me, should I screw him? But this secret, swift, extraordinary buildup of communist missiles. What do you do? You want to cooperate, but you don't want to get screwed. Which cannot be accepted by this country.

Right. You know, these kind of thoughts were paramount in those days because a prisoner's dilemma was being played between the two superpowers. This is our friend Steve Strogett's, the Cornell mathematician, who says, at that time, all kinds of folks. Political scientists and economists and psychologists, mathematicians. We're writing papers about the prisoner's dilemma. Literally, in thinking, come on, we've got to be able to win this game

if we're going to play against the Russians, and we have to do it right. Exactly. But there was no consensus on the best way to do it. And so I was interested in what's a good strategy for this. And that's when Robert Axelrod is sitting down there in the basement somewhere in the Midwest with the big computer, that's when he had his idea. His approach, which was really novel at the time, was to conduct a computer tournament. A computer tournament? Yeah. I invite the people that had come up with these different ideas to play with each other.

In other words, what he said is, all right, Mr. Wise guy, you know, you've written so and So many articles on the Prisoner's Dilemma, you think you understand it. How about joining this tournament where you have to submit a program that will play Prisoner's Dilemma against programs submitted by the other experts? We'll have a round robin. Right. Try these different programs against each other. So all these computer guys are brought to Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas and they all wear tuxedos and they're all sat down at the table.

No. It's a nice image. But what really happened was everyone submitted their programs to Axelrod. They would mail their entries to me. But there was a trophy. There was a trophy. So I wrote to people and I said, if you win, I'll send you a trophy.

You know, a little plaque that says you won the computer tournament. Okay, so here's the deal. Every program will play every other program 200 times. There will be points in each round, and then Axelrod will total the scores. And see what actually worked. By which he means, in the long run, even if you lose some rounds here and there,

one of these strategies is going to beat all the other. meaning it'll let you survive, maybe even prosper. That's the game. That's right. And can you introduce us to some of the contestants? Yeah. So there was one program called Massive Retaliatory Strike. On the first move, it just cooperates.

But then as soon as the other program doesn't cooperate, it would then retaliate for the rest of the game. Like, sorry, man, you blew it. I'll never trust you again. Yeah, that's it for you. this is like the way my wife is whenever a guy in her earlier life stood her up that was it

game over but there were also some trickier programs I mean some crafty ones try to make a model of the opponent like you mentioned one that was called tester so tester would see what you were like it would start by being mean and then if you start retaliating

it backs off and says you know ho ho chill out it's okay man and you know and then starts cooperating for a while until it throws in another. Just to test the other guy goes after I was called Tester. Yeah, so Tester is kind of

designed to see how much it could get away with. I mean, it sounds kind of sensible in a way. I mean, but if you see, if you think about what happens if these two players play each other? If Tester plays massive retaliation 200 times? Pretty soon the tester will defect and then

massive retaliation will never cooperate again. You, Paul. Yeah, no, screw you. Screw you. Let's go. You screw me. You're going to take you.

You come to this class. So, in fact, they're going to do very badly, both of them. When you're sitting there, did you have a hunch as to which would be the most successful program? Well, I didn't know, and which is why I wanted to do it. But I did have a hunch that, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of lines of code would be needed to have a pretty competent program. So when the mailman delivers the fattest,

envelope to your house, he's like, this could be the one. Well, yes, right. Now, it didn't turn out that way. When it was all said and done, when he loaded all the programs into the computer, when they'd all played each other 200 times, the program that won? It's really two lines of code. Two lines of code? Yeah, it's got a simple name. It's called tit for tat.

First line of code? Bebe. Nice. Nice? Yeah, nice. Nice is a technical one. word in this game. Nice means I never am nasty first. And after that, second line of code. It just does what the other player did on the previous move. So if the other player has just cooperated, it'll

cooperate. And if the other player has just defected, it'll defect. It retaliates on the next move. Couldn't be clearer. On the other hand, it only retaliates that one time. I mean, unless provoked further, it does its retaliation and now bygones or bygones, and that's it. So wait, how? How do you? How? How exactly did it win? I mean, can you give us a sense of why it won? Okay, so let's suppose, here, let's take an extreme case of some very simple programs. One of them I'll call Jesus. Just for the sake of argument.

Now, the Jesus program cooperates on every turn. That is, it's always, you know. Good. Yes. So the Jesus program is a simple algorithm that says, always be good. Good, good, good, good. That's right.

And let's say the other program is the Lucifer program, which no matter what, always, is bad. Okay. These are your two extremes, says Steve. And, of course, most programs and most people

fall somewhere in the middle. Right. But in tit-for-tat, you've got a strategy that can swing both ways. For instance, with Jesus, tit-for-tat starts by cooperating, as does Jesus.

And then they're going to keep cooperating for the whole 200 rounds. Which is, you know... Good. But now let's suppose it plays Lucifer, where there's no chance to cooperate. Then says Steve Tit for tat just plays good defense. So, when Lucifer does his thing,

Tit for tat retaliates. And they pretty much keep doing that and stay even. So in other words... It's a very robust program. It elicits cooperation if the opponent has any inclination to cooperate. But it doesn't take any guff.

And it wins. So you might say in evolutionary terms, this program is the fittest. So actually, Axelrod played an evolutionary version of his tournament. That is, he had these programs after they played their tournament, get a chance to reproduce copies of themselves according to how well they did. You mean the winners would get to have more babies? Yeah. And then would the babies play each other? Yeah, he ran them again. I mean, he ran them for many generations. And so, like, suppose you have a world of Lucifer's.

and there are a few tit-for-tat players out there. Can they thrive? Can cooperation emerge in this horribly hostile world? What an interesting question. So he looked at that, and the answer was, if you have enough of them, so that they have enough chance of meeting each other, and they can actually invade and take over the world, even if the world starts horribly mean.

I mean, what I take to be the big message, though, I mean, what always sent chills down my spine is that we see this version of morality around the world. You know, be upright, forgiving, but retaliatory. I mean, that sounds to me like the Old Testament. It's not turned the other cheek. It's an eye for an eye, but not ten eyes for an eye. And to think that it's not something that's handed down by our teachers or by God, but that it's something that came from biology.

I like that argument personally. From biology. Now, do we know whether the math has anything to do with real people in real life situations? Or are we just abstracting behavior? Is this wise or is this just math? This is what's so impressive to me about Axelrod's work. So he's not just playing math games. he tries to tie this to history and politics as seen.

I like to scan journals. One of my, I wouldn't say it's past Angus. It's part of my profession. But I came across a book called the Live and Let Live system in World War I. So here's where we jump away from the math and the computer tournaments and into something very real. The war began late in July, 1914. That's Stan. Stanley Winfield.

Expert in World War I. Evan Few Professor Emeritus at Penn State. And the story that Stan's going to help us tell takes place on what was called the Western Front, which was basically these two lines of trenches. Very close to each other, a few hundred yards apart. And they stretched for hundreds of miles. And that fall... In November, the weather turned bad.

Heavy rains. Then it became icy. And then slush and then snow. It became disgusting because the trenches also were filled with rats. rats. The rats went after not only the food, but after corpses. And it was oddly in this miserable, disgusting hellhole, that something quite amazing happened. No one quite knows how it started, but one day, maybe around daybreak, let's say, while the two sides were fighting, some of the British soldiers... Stop firing long enough to have breakfast.

And as they were eating, they noticed, hmm, the Germans stopped too, to have their breakfast. When they're both done, they'd begin firing again. Next morning, same thing. British take their breakfast break at about the same time. The Germans do the same thing. The morning after that, the same thing. And then the next. And after a while...

Both sides caught on. If they didn't interrupt the other one, then they wouldn't be interrupted. On the whole, there is silence. This is from a letter a British soldier sent home to his wife at the time. After all, if... If you prevent your enemy from drawing his rations, his remedy is simple. He will prevent you from drawing yours. When Axelrod read this?

I thought, gee, this sounds very familiar. Line one of tit for tat. Be nice first. Now, the Brits probably didn't mean to be nice first when they started the breakfast truce, but it happened. And then the Germans reciprocated, which is line two. Now, keep in mind, these two sides are at war. And implicit in line two is a threat.

If you mess with me, I'm going to mess with you. Well, think about snipers, for example. There's letters where they explained where the snipers would shoot at a tree over and over and over again, showing that, in fact, they were really accurate, meaning that if they wanted to kill you, they'd get you. And this was going on during the breakfast truce, and these little agreements, you know, like, I'm going to be nice to you, but I could kick your ass. Don't forget. Well, these little trusses spread all up and down the Western Front until things really changed. Fast forward to December, Christmas Eve. The climate was just about freezing.

on Christmas Eve. And the Germans had a tradition of tabletop Christmas trees, small trees. For weeks, he said, the German government had been shipping small trees literally to the trenches, hundreds and hundreds of trees. And that night, on Christmas Eve, at dusk, the Germans began putting up their trees, mounted them on the rim of their trench, and lit candles on them, singing Christmas carol. The British who might have been known more than 50 or 70 or 70, 70 yards away, crawled forward into no man's land to see better. And then they were spotted.

Here's a letter from a German soldier sent home to his family, which describes what happened next. I shouted to our enemies that we didn't wish to shoot. I said we could speak to each other. At first there was silence. And then very slowly out of the darkness, the British guys approached. And so we came together and shook hands. Rob, see, this is where I start to think, are you making this up? Because this is where it starts to sound sort of crazy to me.

That's Pat Walters, our producer. It sounds as if this is being made up, and the result was for many decades, people assumed that this was just myth. It couldn't possibly have happened. But we know it had happened because we have the letters that the British and the Germans sent back home. We know that they met in darkness and decided, why don't we have a truth in the morning? next morning thousands of soldiers put down their rifles

climbed out of their trenches into no man's land and started hanging out with each other a lot of us went over and talked to them and this lasted the whole morning I talked to several of them and I must say they seemed extraordinarily fine men soldiers got together started fires

cooked Christmas dinners swapped presents and drank the Germans hauled out these enormous barrels of beer they traded stuff cigars and trinkets even helped one another buried the dead And in some places on the Western Front, this period of goodwill lasted a whole week.

But then, the generals found out. They were very angry about this, and they said, if we didn't send you to the front to be nice to the other guys, we said to kill them. If the general says, hey, I want you to shoot those Germans, that's an order. Well, then they would... Wouldn't that... Oh, gee, sorry, General, I missed, but I'll try again better next time. I see. The way the generals finally figured out how to disrupt this whole thing is they would

say, okay, you guys go out on a raid, and I want you to bring back a prisoner or a corpse. In other words, show me a scalp. That's an order. And that messed things up royally. Here's a letter from a British soldier whose unit contained a band, which was apparently pretty common. He writes this letter about one of the moments when the truce vanished. At six minutes to midnight, the band opened with the Vauktaum Rhyde. which is a German patriotic anthem. So some of the Germans, according to this letter,

climbed up onto the rim of their trench to listen to this English band playing their song. Then, as the last note sounded, every grenade firing rifle, trench mortar, and bomb-throwing machine let fly simultaneously into the German trench. So you can imagine the Germans that weren't killed would have felt betrayed. They'd just been hanging out with these guys. And the next night, they would have attacked back, and the British would have attacked them back.

And then the Germans would have retaliated against them, and on and on and on. And it would kind of echo back and forth forever. And that's what happened. There were immense casualties, as many as 50,000 casualties in a day. And this says Axelrod is where you see sort of the dark side of tit for tat. One of the weaknesses of the tit-for-tat strategy or one of the problems with it is these echoes. Not just echoes of good, obviously, but echoes of violence. Could get bad.

So what I found, though, was that instead of playing pure tit-for-tat where you always defect, if the other guy defects. There are certain circumstances, he says, and this I find completely fascinating, where you want to modify that second line of code. So that you're not always retaliating, you're nearly always retaliating. Right. If you were a little bit generous, which by... by which I mean, say, 10% of the time you don't defect, then what happens is that these echoes will stop. And I would call that generous tit for tat.

So this is kind of interesting. Like we started with Moses, you know, an eye for an eye. But here it's saying maybe for every nine parts Moses, you need one part Jesus. Meaning like turn the other cheek. Turn the other cheek. It sounds like you described like a cooking recipe or something. Well.

Like nine parts, one thing. Yeah, I mean, if you abstracted, it's kind of a recipe. It's a recipe for life. But it isn't a recipe. That ignores the deep fact of it. Look, if I were punching you in the face right now, what are you going to do? I'm going to punch you back. I'm going to punch you back.

You punch me back. I'm going to punch you back. And we're in pain. Yeah. And somehow in the middle of being blasted by my powerful fist, you have to come up with the moral courage to say, I think I'm going to kiss this guy now. And that is not, as you well know, that is not an easy thing to do. All right, but you're making it all personal.

My point is, if you zoom out, this is a strategy that just, seems to be woven into the fabric of the cosmos. It works for computers. It works for people. It probably works for amoeba. Okay? It just works. And you think that exists on some higher plane?

I do. I do. I don't. I think this is still, as you just called it, very personal. I think a person has to choose to be kind. All right. I'm going to make that choice right now then, okay? Even though you're irritating me, I'm going to say to you, Robert, you look very nice today.

You know what I'm going to do to you? All right. enough of this. Radiolab.org is our online home. You can read lots of stuff there and you can subscribe to our podcast. It's WWW. That's implied. Yeah. Hi, I'm Sivant Vermeuri and I'm from Mumbai and here are the staff credits. Radio Lab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasar. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters.

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