3 ms·
George Price: The man who died trying to prove selflessness doesn’t exist
- philbo 10y agoApologies for the slightly editorialised title; I omitted the word altruistic in order to come in under the 80-character limit.
- philbo 10y agoThe Price equation was not, as Price had hinted to him, a new derivation or correction of his ideas. Instead, it was “a strange new formalism that was applicable to every kind of natural selection”. Its strangeness came precisely because Price was not a biologist – instead of starting from the work of their scientific forebears, he had worked everything out for himself from first principles. “In doing so,” wrote Hamilton, “he had found himself on a new road and amid startling landscapes.”