The Price of Altruism (19 page)

In February 1946 Allee had wheeled himself by mistake into an open elevator shaft, landed on his head, and cracked his skull. Soft spoken and gentle before the accident, he became domineering and tempestuous. As he recovered and returned to the lab, the world outside grew ominous: Capitalism and communism were locked in battle; the threat of thermonuclear destruction loomed; prospects of world government and peace seemed vanishing. Naturalizing ethics, too, felt more dubious than previously suspected. For a peaceful integrator the “superorganism” now looked more and more like a monster: Wasn’t democracy, after all, about individual autonomy and freedom?

Quaker biology was a farce, “integration” a bogey. However much Allee would have wanted him to do so, man could not simply become a planarian. “It is fine for you to say that the study of animal population problems is the key to establishing the peace of the world,” a reply to one of his grant proposals to the National Research Council now read. “If you could prove that, there ought to be loads of money to help you do the work. But as it stands now, there seem to be too many links in the chain of reasoning connecting research in animal population and the peace of the world.”
⁶⁰

When he reached retirement age from the University of Chicago, Allee moved to Florida, and on March 18, 1955, succumbed to a kidney infection. At the funeral someone said that by showing that cooperation could arise between unrelated organisms, he had brought the greatest word from science since Darwin.
⁶¹
Shuffling their feet, loving mourners and even Friends tried to feel encouraged. But as they looked at the world around them an unmistakable glint of doubt had sneaked into their eyes.

Just a year after Allee’s death and his own Senate confirmation hearing, von Neumann was invited to the White House to receive the Medal of Freedom. As always he was dapper with a white handkerchief in the breast pocket of his dark suit and a shiny war medal on his lapel. But he was not well. Shaking President Eisenhower’s hand from his wheelchair, he mentioned how he wished he could be around long enough to deserve the honor. “Oh yes, you will be with us for a long time,” the president replied, adding, kindheartedly, “we need you.”
⁶²

The golden age at RAND had passed. Real problems, people were now saying, were simply too messy to be solved in a matrix.
⁶³
Science had not been a panacea after all. It had failed to deliver human nature.

Von Neumann was dying of bone cancer. As his body deteriorated, he began to lose his mind. In a hospital bed he mumbled nonsense in Hungarian. At night terror-filled screams echoed from his room throughout the ward: Dementia had set in. To prevent secrets from being accidentally divulged, air force personnel with special security clearance were stationed outside his door.

His brother Michael was at his bedside, reading Goethe’s
Faust
to him in the original German. Michael paused to turn the page. His eyes closed, von Neumann whispered the next few lines from memory. He died the next day, on February 8, 1957, convinced, as Orwell put it, of the “bottomless selfishness” of mankind.
⁶⁴

“Dr. George R. Price—Researcher shows how to speed up invention,” from the
Minneapolis Sunday Tribune,
January 20, 1957

T
he American Society for Psychical Research had been founded in Boston in 1885, just three years after its mother society in London. William James, Harvard philosopher and psychologist, brother of the novelist Henry, and one of the city’s most illustrious sons, was a proud patron; the scientific study of so-called psychic or paranormal behavior was the society’s mandate; and its validation and broadcast its spur. Astonishing feats of levitation, clairvoyance, and telepathy had captured the American imagination. Bedazzled journalists reported from chiaroscuro inner sanctums on “materializations,” or the appearance from thin air of lost brooches, misplaced wills, hidden family heirlooms. There were “veridical” apparitions, “crystal visions,” and “hallucinogenic trances.” Was all this for real? people wanted to know; and could science somehow explain it?
¹
Two men, Joseph Rhine and Samuel Soal, would be the ones who would provide the answers.

Even though the society’s own days were short-lived, the supernatural continued to gnaw at the nation’s mind. In 1911 Stanford University became the first major academic institution in America to pick up the challenge, followed by Duke in 1930. It was there, in Durham, North Carolina, that a former preministerial hopeful who had seen the light of science, abandoned theology, and in turn been disappointed by materialism, turned to the enigma of “psi.” Joseph B. Rhine had flip-flopped from faith in miracles to faith in physics to faith in something science could not account for. But amid these acrobatics one thing now seemed clear: Parapsychology was real.
²

Across the Atlantic in England, a first-class mathematician from Queen Mary College became interested in communication with the departed. Samuel Soal’s brother had died in the war, and like many grieving loved ones he turned to the mediums. Impressed by a particular instance of telepathy, he wrote a long entry on “spiritualism” for the
Encyclopedia of the Occult
. But Soal had exacting scientific standards, and moved methodically to test them. More than 128,000 card-guessing trials with 160 participants later, skepticism had emerged the victor. ESP, he reluctantly but also mockingly now pronounced, was “miraculously” an American phenomenon. Rhine was by this time the doyen of parapsychology, celebrated author of the best selling
New Frontiers of the Mind
. Crushingly, he soon became the butt of Soal’s relentless ridicule.
³

But then, in 1939, Soal took a second look at his old data, and what he found left his mouth dry and jaw dangling. Refusing to believe what his eyes had witnessed, he set up the most meticulous ESP experiments ever performed. The results, he now claimed, proved beyond a shadow of imaginable doubt that precognition and telepathy were bona fide. Two individuals, the celebrated London portrait photographer Basil Shackleton and a Mrs. Gloria Stewart, had beaten the odds against chance by enormous margins. Even when sender and receiver were miles apart, Shackelton and Stewart could predict future card picks. Statistics couldn’t lie nor, Soal claimed, could twenty-one prominent observers. Whatever the explanation, whatever the device, the regular laws of physics had been fabulously violated.
⁴

On both sides of the Atlantic believers finally got what they had asked for: a foolproof corroboration of the miraculous. Rhine and Soal were neither quacks nor impostors nor swindlers nor cheats; they were respected members of the scientific community. By 1955 their two-punch combination had entirely silenced the opposition, or so, at least, they believed. To anyone following the proceedings, the chilling implications were plain: Modern science would need to come up with an explanation; if it couldn’t, its entire edifice would collapse.

Meanwhile in New York City Alice Price was communicating with the dead. “My dear dear hardworking wife” she wrote to herself from her husband who had died twenty-five years earlier. “I am so sorry that you must go through this awful struggle for your daily bread but soon your worst will be over.” Another letter, addressed to “Dear Friend,” pledged intervention on an impending Display deal: “Alice is under such strain, and I am doing all I can to influence everyone connected to the deal…. Tell her that I am working overtime to bring things around as they should be. Sincerely, W.E. Price.” A third communication promised salvation: “I am sure you will be rewarded soon for your patience and Christian spirit,” it said in scribbled Scripture, and ended: “I am with you always, your Billy.”
⁵

Back in Minnesota the polio had left its mark on George: a limp that unsettled his gait and a right shoulder that forced him to bring his cup to his mouth southpaw to avoid completely soiling his face. He was back in his student quarters, alone, in the Minnesota winter. Most days he stayed at home. At the lab there was plenty of work on porphyrins, and a new project constructing a mechanical heart-lung. But he had lost any real interest. His heart was somewhere else. His work was so technical that only a handful of people would ever read it. The more he hibernated, the more he craved an audience, the more he wanted to write about things that people cared about. And so, limping and brooding and altogether searching; trying to get his body to the bathroom and his cup to his lips, George came to the rescue of modern science.
⁶

Or maybe it was to get Alice to stop writing those letters to herself. Whether he acted out of filial concern or gallant scientism, one thing was clear to George: Rhine and Soal were frauds. There were no two ways about it. Espionage agencies knew it. Earthquake watchers knew it. Houdini knew it. Even the great dead Scottish philosopher David Hume knew it, all the way beneath his Calton Hill tombstone. For if parapsychology were real, secret messages could be teleported by agents from the Kremlin. Catastrophes could be averted. Magic could be performed without trickery. If Rhine and Soal were right it meant that knavery was less probable than miracles, a possibility that Hume had found highly unlikely. Growing up with Alice, George had believed in ESP. He had even written to Rhine as a young undergraduate from Harvard to suggest clever ways to help prove it. But gradually, with science, incredulity had replaced faith, and for years now he had been internally fuming. “Is it more probable,” Tom Paine had asked in his
The Age of Reason
, “that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie?” To George the answer was obvious.
⁷

And so, in the pages of
Science
, for all the world to see, he suggested six ways in which Soal could have cheated. Rejecting the peddled notion that parapsychology and science were compatible, he demanded “not 1000 experiments with 10 million trials and by 100 separate investigators giving total odds against chance of 101000 to 1.” What George Price wanted was “just one good experiment” one convincing experiment that didn’t have to be accepted “simply on a basis of faith in human honesty.” The essence of science was
mechanism
. The essence of magic was
animism
. Until Rhine and Soal could show a mechanism to explain their findings, George would not be impressed. And, he hoped, all thinking people, too, would withhold belief in such pabulum.
⁸

Who this George Price was no one quite knew, but he sure had excited a furor. In an exposé in
Esquire
, Aldous Huxley, the grandson of Darwin’s “bulldog,” called it “almost unique as a piece of bad manners.” Lambasting the author’s “fetish for facts” and his shamanlike belief in his “favorite metaphysical hypothesis,” Huxley churlishly apologized that the human mind wasn’t as tidy as the physicist’s “molecules.” Was the essence of science really mechanism and nothing more? “No date, no qualifications of any kind—just a flat statement of the Eternal Truth by direct wire from Mount Sinai to the University of Minnesota.” If Price was after repeatability and would not acknowledge ESP without it, then why acknowledge Bach or Shakespeare or Wordsworth? After all, such men had beaten all odds against chance, and even
their
brilliance couldn’t be summoned at a coin drop.
⁹

The muckraking writer Upton Sinclair, too, was unenlightened by George’s diatribe. Arriving in Chicago at the turn of the century, he had exclaimed: “Hello! I’m Upton Sinclair, and I’m here to write the
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
of the Labor Movement!” His classic study of the corruption of the meatpacking industry,
The Jungle
, had stunned America and won him a Pulitzer Prize. But Sinclair himself was most stunned by his wife’s clairvoyant abilities, powers that became apparent when she sensed Jack London’s impending suicide from afar. In
Mental Radio
from 1929, he and his wife described three hundred carefully controlled experiments in which she had guessed what doodle he had placed in an envelope in another room. The book was such a hit that it played a role in Duke University’s creation of Rhine’s department, and even received a preface in its German edition from Albert Einstein. Now nearly an octogenarian, Sinclair wrote to Price excitedly challenging him to explain
that
!
¹⁰

Thousands of readers who had seen the write-up in the
New York Times
, wrote to express their thanks, advice, or outrage. A reverend from Vallejo, California, reminded George politely that “there are many things in heaven and earth that scientists do not know.” A woman from France animatedly shared how her dead husband teleported which kind of spaghetti sauce to make for dinner each night. Another, from New Haven, Connecticut, puzzled over how it was that she had performed Rhine’s experiment on pigs and gotten the same results as he had in humans. Mr. Chalmers of Chalmers Oil Burning Company in Chicago suggested how cards could be rigged at their edges (“Thanks a lot!” George replied). And Fern Clarke from Los Angeles wondered why George “could not see and talk to God,” and then offered her complete psychological evaluation (“Thank you,” he replied kindly, “but your guesses about me are not particularly accurate”).
¹¹

The public reaction was so great that
Science
decided to dedicate its next issue to rebuttal in the winter of 1956. Here Rhine and Soal and even some Minnesota colleagues came at George like clairvoyants after a scrap of the future. The editorial had called for “skepticism…on both sides of the argument,” but Soal found George “grossly unfair,” and his Minnesota colleagues deemed his attack “pointless” and “irresponsible.” Could any one really believe that respectable scientists were mere mountebanks and swindlers? Price had offered no shred of evidence. His unlikely “act,” Rhine suggested, must be a deliberate undertaking to sell parapsychology to the public in the guise of a slanderous critique. After all, George had done parapsychology an unheard of service: “Yes, either the present mechanistic theory of man
is
wrong—that is, fundamentally incomplete—or, of course, the parapsychologists
are
all utterly mistaken. One of these opponents is wrong; take it, now, from the pages of
Science
!”
¹²

Only Harvard’s emeritus professor of physics, the Nobel Laureate Percy Williams Bridgman, expressed any doubt about the claimants. “The paradox inherent in the application of a probability calculation to any concrete situation,” he wrote in a dry academic demeanor, “is well brought out by Bertrand Russell, who remarked that we encounter a miracle every time we read the license number of a passing automobile.” If a calculation had been made for that happening, the chances against odds would be overwhelming. “Probability” was a confused concept. Until it was untangled Bridgman would pass.
¹³

George was unperturbed. He had the uttermost respect for Bridgman, but his probability argument didn’t provide an escape from having to choose between ESP or fraud. Human psychology was a strange and curious beast: However he detested the thought of unpredictability, man would rather believe in a suspension of natural law than countenance the possibility of deception. A strange mixture of credulity and incredulity was our lot, but it needn’t take over our reason. “Where is the definitive experiment?” George stubbornly demanded. Nothing else would satisfy him.
¹⁴

Preparations were being made. Born Orlando Carmelo Scarnecchia, John Scarne had come a long way since a local shark taught him three-card monte on the streets of Fairview, New Jersey. He was now America’s most famous magician and authority on gambling, and many times over a millionaire. His signature trick, “Scarne’s Aces,” was a dazzler, and his “Triple Coincidence,” too. Sure, he would be glad to take part in George’s challenge. In fact he would even pay for flying
the
expert antitrickster, the Argentine Ricardo Musso, all the way from Buenos Aires for the event.
¹⁵

It was just the kind of attention for which an awkward outsider yearned. First the bigwigs at the Manhattan Project, then Bardeen and Shockley at Bell, now Bridgman and also his hero, Claude Shannon, to whom George had written for his thoughts about “Science and the Supernatural” (Shannon replied that if ESP were real, it would “undermine everything”).
¹⁶
Aldous Huxley, Upton Sinclair, Albert Einstein…. His name was right up there with the big ones. The “definitive experiment” would make him famous.

It never happened. There was the business of translation problems of Ricardo Musso’s excited letters from Argentina. There was an old porphyrin paper to get off. There was fatigue. And then there were Julia and the kids. “All I can say,” George wrote to his buddy Al in their usual oddball humor, “is that I got up to a 5 mile run (run?), and last spring I did 140 in a clean and jerk. Oh yes, also I was divorced January 20.”
¹⁷
The “definitive experiment” had been killed before it was born, a victim of alimony, inertia, and Babel. In truth these were all just excuses. George never quite finished what he started, and he knew it. Besides, his heart was already somewhere else.