Science can ruin your life

That is a true statement.  Just ask George Robert Price (but you had better call either the Ghostbusters or Beetle-breakfast).  He was a Renaissance Man of Science... Manhattan Project, Biological Chemistry and a professor at Harvard...  How weird.

It was his own science that did him in... and, as I am still working my way through his biography, I will say this about him: He seems like someone who had it all together, but carved his own throat out with scissors while in a great depressed state.

Nice, right?  And to think of all the ladies he could have had...

So this Price fella... he worked for sometime at Harvard, about two years or so.  He worked with a lab that was linked to the Manhattan project.  Other scientists wrote papers with him.  But fuck all that... it can be found on Wikipedia (as well as that sweet ass photo).

What I'm reading right now, or attempting to as it was written by a bunch of chimps it seems... is a book titled The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness by Oren Harman. See, what this book details, and what Price found out, is that we are all programmed.

Here is an analogy: I am more genetically disposition to help save my brother's life (Patrick) in a hairy situation than to save a perfect stranger's life.  Price came up with a mathematical equation that represents the reasoning behind this.  And because of this genetic predisposition to put my genes on the line to save my brother (whom, by genetic certainty, has genes very similar to my own) I am subconsciously making a choice to make a sacrifice but also carry on my genes.

Seems legit, right?

Again, it would be time to ask Price...  Oh, wait.  We can't.  He's dead, you see.  It really fucked him up... ruined his life.  He left his wife, left his kids, no longer working with IBM or Argonne Labs (the Manhattan Project folks...) he moved to Britain.  

Price felt bad after all... he came up with this equation that proved there was no reason people were actually nice.  It all comes down to this... when you are farther away genetically from another person you are less likely to help due to this.  Want to donate a quarter to that man playing the saxophone on the street? Sure, go ahead...  Now, picture yours truly... an unshaven, un-showered Daniel out there... on the corner. I'm pretty sure it isn't a quarter in the case.

See?  His OWN science ruined him.

I might post more if I can get through this damn book... I'm fifty pages in and the main person was finally mentioned.  Really hard to get into a book about a guy when he isn't really in it.

But, here is a really cool quote from it:

"This was quite an idea, for the very essence of Darwin's theory, as he declared in The Origin of Species was that 'every complex structure and instinct' should be 'useful to the possessor.'  Natural selection could 'never produce in a being anything injurious to itself, for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each'  And yet it did."

It's funny... that was mostly quotes from Darwin, with the writer filling in the gaps... but the equation and theory that our man Price came up with proved Darwin had only HALF of the picture.

Pretty sweet.

And now, I must go... 

More research is needed on next post.  I also might try and get through this book.  When I get to the equation, Pat, I will let you know.

Sherwood (the youngest)