Reviews

• Best

• This is an insightful book, and a great read. It marries the private life of researchers with their research, and masterfully guides the reader through the stories that comprise history. Loved it.

• I just reread this book. Fascinating and tragic. Yet, highly enlightening.

• Almost completely unknown outside of academia and then perhaps only within evolutionary biology, George Price was a quite simply a genius. This book demonstrates his genius but goes much further and demonstrates his failings as a husband, father and son. Not that Price was necessarily a bad man, just a hugely complicated human being. He possessed a Savant-like ability to research and develop very clear insights. He was also not constrained by feeling of indaquacey in any one discipline. If there was something he didn't know he would (and could) find out what he needed. The problem was that he would invariably lose interest or become sidetracked by something else. So although he trained as a Chemist he was able to invent computer aided design and manufacture and then fail to have the idea patented. He developed a theory for the role of glial cells in human vision while thinking about computer vision, but it stumped the Chief Physiologists of the day because it was too mathematical I suspect (this was before interdisciplinary working was an established practice). After being wounded in a botched operation Price wound up moving to London and making huge contributions to evolutionary biology and game theory, but this time he was recognised by pioneers in the field such as Maynard and it was these guys who supported him and it was University College London (UCL) that gave hime space and reources to continue with his work despite his (by now) wild appearance, sudden funmdamentalist religious conversion and his alcoholic tramp mates. Who would come looking for him in the University with resulting mayhem. The story doesn't end well and Price was buried in an unmarked grave in London but his contributions are still being used and developed to this day. That's the story, the book covers all of the above and a hell of a lot of other stuff, taking in Darwin's travels, the Russian Revolution, American Cold War Politics, Post Darwin confusion and above all the search for the evolutionary basis of altruism. It is a complicated and at times, frustrating read. but hang in there and you are ultimately rewarded with a quite literally fantastic tale. It would be hard to make up this kind of stuff and be believed. This is Price warts and all. He tried to sort it all out and ultimately maybe he tried to take it a step too far and paid the price (hence the cunning title). Good on you George. RIP.

• This is an intriguing biography of George Price, a little-known population geneticist, interwoven with an intellectual history of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. While the story of Price's life is diverting and compelling in its own right, the real thrill of this book is that it unveils some very contemporary improvements in the science of group selection and, as the subtitle suggests, the origins of kindness. Oren Harmen does a great job picking through the advanced statistics and elements of game theory that led to Price's most substantial breakthrough, giving the reader a good commonsense understanding of how individual and group behaviors can both be perpetuated through evolutionarily stable strategies. Yes, Price did end his life after a rather spectacular descent into homelessness and futile ministrations to a community of destitute alcoholics, but the attempts that Harmen makes to link the body of Price's professional work to his personal life are a bit of a stretch. While there is an appealing symmetry to the study of altruism and the surrendering of one's autonomy to the idea of Jesus Christ, there seems to be little indication that Price's late-life fundamentalism and erratic behavior correlated meaningfully with his relatively passionless theorizing. What make it a good story is that it comes together in meaningful ways in the imagination of the reader, rather than in the life of the subject.

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