...
and its utilisation for the justification of political failure
In 1967, a
strange and brilliant man came to London from America. He was called
George Price. By chance, in a library, Price discovered a scientific
paper written by Bill Hamilton. It was full of equations that show
that human goodness and altruism were really survival strategies
devised by our genes. It had been ignored by the scientific
establishment.
As Price
looked at the equations, he had a sudden shock of recognition. He
realised that what he was looking at was a description of machines he
already understood – computers. Price had worked originally as a
chemist on the Manhattan Project, but then in the 1950s, he had gone
to IBM, where he helped design the graphics for early mainframe
computers.
Price was an
obsessive rationalist and in his spare time, he became a freelance
science journalist and he specialised in attacking the myths and
superstitions in society. Because he believed that rationality could
explain everything.
Above all,
Price loved the cold logic of mathematics and computers. He believed
that computers gave scientists like him a new power to analyse the
world in a completely rational way. He wrote an article proposing
that America could mathematically measure unhappiness levels among
populations in the world. This would allow them to spot where
Communism might take root and so prevent it.
Price's
ideas were part of a powerful belief that had grown up in the
electronic laboratories of the Cold War - that computers could be the
salvation of humanity. The godfather of this belief was the man who
had done more than anyone to create the modern digital computer, the
mathematician John Von Neumann, who had also built the H-bomb.
And when, in
1967, Price found William Hamilton's paper, he realised that what
Hamilton had discovered was a new rational way of looking at human
beings and their behaviour. They were simply soft machines,
controlled by on-board computers.
Price took
Hamilton's mathematics and developed it. But as he did so, he
realised that the equations also worked in reverse. That it was not
just logical to be good, it was also logical to be spiteful. It made
sense to kill yourself, if in the process you also killed people
distantly related to you and allowed those closely related to
survive. Price's mathematics explained murder, warfare and even
genocide as possibly rational strategies for the genes controlling
your behaviour.
James
Schwartz, George Price's biographer states: “Well, because it meant
that you could have genes that were evolved that were coded for
murdering people. Such a gene, even if it was bad for the possessor
of the gene, as long as it was worse for distantly related people, it
could evolve and we might be genetically programmed to be murderers.
This was actually what George had been wondering and he sort of
proved that in a mathematical sense, it could exist. It grew out of
Hamilton's theory because Hamilton had seen that you could harm
yourself as long as you helped your relatives. But this was
different, you could harm yourself as long as it harmed
distantly-related people that we had genetic ways of recognising our
closer relatives and our more distant relatives and we were
programmed to hate and kill our more distant relatives. These are the
implications of the theory. [...] The genes would grow in the
population. That's what this was all about.”
Price showed
his equations to Hamilton. Hamilton was fascinated and together they
developed their theory. It would become known as the Selfish Gene.
They also became close friends. What Price had done was an incredible
piece of mathematics. As Von Neumann had predicted, what Price has
also done was bring rationality and a clear logic of mathematics into
a new field, into the heart of being human, but with the strangest of
consequences.
20 years
before, as computers were being developed, Von Neumann had dreamt of
the future where machines would be able to replicate themselves. He
had written out a description of what would be needed for what he
called self-reproducing automata to be invented.
The
extraordinary breakthrough that Price and Hamilton had made was to
discover that self-reproducing automata didn't have to be invented.
They were already here, they were us. The equation has had enormous
implications because if everything we did, whether good or bad, was
actually a rational strategy computed by the codes inside us, then
religion with its moral guidance was irrelevant. And it demolished
the Enlightenment idea that human beings were above the rest of
nature. In reality, we were no different from all the other animals.
All this had
a very strange effect on George Price, the convinced rationalist. He
decided that the discovery was so powerful, it must have been a gift
from God. In 1973, George Price decided to devote his life to helping
the homeless of London. As a result of the equations he had
developed, Price had been given a job in the genetics laboratory of
the University of London, but he had also converted to Christianity.
And he had done so in an extreme way.
Price
decided that he was going to follow the teachings of Christ as if
they were an exact code. He set out to help the poor and destitute to
give them all his worldly goods. He also walked the streets, offering
the homeless a place to stay in his flat near Oxford Circus.
William
Hamilton became desperately worried about Price. He was convinced
that his religious belief was a mad superstition, and pleaded with
Price to give up trying to help the homeless and do more work on
genetics. But others believed that Price had been so shocked by the
implication of his and Hamilton's theory that he was in some
desperate personal way trying to disprove it.
Hamilton was
by now one of the most famous scientists in the world. He was given
the highest honours by the scientific establishment, but his theories
had led him into a very dark place. He had written a series of books
called Narrow Roads Of Gene Land. In them, Hamilton followed the
logic of natural selection to its extreme conclusion. The idea that
we should use western science and medicine to prolong the lives of
those who would otherwise die, he said, was wrong. It would allow the
genetically inferior to survive, and so would weaken society. Nothing
should be allowed to interfere with the strategy of the genes.
Then,
Hamilton heard a story from a journalist. The journalist believed
that the AIDS virus had been accidentally created by American
scientists in the Congo in the 1950s when they were testing a polio
vaccine. The Americans had set up a laboratory to make the vaccine by
growing it in the cells of chimpanzees. And the journalist's theory
said that by doing this, the vaccine had become mixed with the chimp
version of HIV, which then entered human beings when they took the
vaccine.
Hamilton was
fascinated. He was convinced that the scientific establishment were
trying to suppress the evidence because it was a challenge to the
idea that modern medicine was always beneficial.
He decided
to break the conspiracy of silence. So he set out for the Congo. He
was going to track down the local chimpanzees, study their viruses
and prove that modern medicine, in trying to save lives, had
inadvertently caused the death of over 20 million people. Hamilton's
journey was a vivid expression of what had happened at the end of the
20th century to the western dream of transforming the world for the
better. Then, Hamilton died, by the freak accident of the aspirin
lodged in his gut, that then caused a haemorrhage.
His theory
about the origin of AIDS in the vaccination programmes of the 1950s
turned out to be completely untrue. Subsequent research has shown
that it had no factual foundation.
But
Hamilton's ideas remain powerfully influential in our society. Above
all, the idea that human beings are helpless chunks of hardware
controlled by software programmes written in their genetic codes.
And the
question is: have we embraced that idea because it is a comfort in a
world where everything we do, either good or bad, seems to have
terrible unforeseen consequences? We know that it was our actions
that have helped to cause the horror still unfolding in the Congo.
Yet we have no idea what to do about it. So instead, we have embraced
a fatalistic philosophy of us as helpless computing machines to both
excuse and explain our political failure to change the world.
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