History and Biology

Abstract

This is a brief history of my intellectual life from age 13 to 29 years—and beyond. It encompasses mathematics, US history, and evolutionary biology, especially social theory based on natural selection.

My father earned a Masters in Mathematics as part of his PhD in Philosophy at Harvard and, therefore, had a large number of math books available in his library. One day at age 13 I spotted a book on Differential Calculus and decided to read it. Within three months I had mastered the subject and saw next to it a book called Integral Calculus and decided to read and master it as well. Thus I began college as an advanced standing sophomore in pure mathematics at Harvard.

The first course I took with about 60 students had no textbook, only a series of weekly problem sets you were expected to try to solve and which were eplained by the professor at the beginning of the next week. I tortured my brain for a week over the first set but could not solve it. It turned out there was a very minor error in the symbols. When I pointed this out in class, the teacher did not apologize for it but brushed it off as trivial. This raised my ire and I pointed out that the problem was insoluble the way he had worded it. At which point the entire class hissed at me.

I then stopped attending class and doing any of the problem sets. Ten days before the 3-h exam, I studied the other problem sets intensively. After taking the exam, I was certain I had done well, hopefully a B+ but at the very least a B-. Instead, I got a D+. When I went to the teaching fellow to argue my case, I pointed out that I had “almost” solved all the questions, he said that “almost” didn’t count in mathematics: you either did or you didn’t. Precision and exactness were the key.

A “D” at Harvard was a passing grade, if not exactly a compliment. The + was valuable because it suggested that with a little more effort I could have vaulted to a C−.

My senior thesis was on “Riots in American History” except that I left out lynchings because I could not stand to read about them. My adviser told me that this was not the way to write a senior thesis. Instead, I was to take one riot in one city and then in one block and describe it in detail, thereby contributing to our knowledge of US history. I was just writing a review and synthesis. I had no interest in contributing to our understanding of US history, in part because I regarded it as a sham, pretending to deal with facts but in fact promoting the notion that ours was the greatest society in the world and the greatest nation that ever existed. Typical titles of books were ”America: Decision for Democracy”.

I studied US history because I decided if I was not going to become a scientist I would become a lawyer—justice instead of truth. I was told US history was an excellent field to master in order to become a lawyer: the Federalist papers, Supreme Court decisions, and so on. But in my junior year I suffered a mental breakdown and spent 2½ months months locked up in mental hospitals in the Boston area. No law school would now accept me and so I graduated with a degree in US history and no intention to continue in that field.

Then I was hired by MACOS—Man: A Course of Study—that had material on hunter -gatherers and baboons, leading up to present-day society. After several weeks of reading I was invited into the boss's office and asked what I knew about sociology: “Nothing.” What did I know about anthropology: “Nothing.” What did I know about animals: “Nothing”. “You are going to work on animals.” That was because they cared less about animals. On such trivia your whole life may turn. Learning sociology and anthropology would have been of minor value. Learning about animals and biology was another matter entirely.

I was assigned a biologist by the name of Bill Drury who vetted my work. I drove out to Lincoln, MA, and presented a novel argument for the existence of caribou antlers which argued that they were good for the species. Bill batted this down easily and said species argumentation fails on its face: natural selection works at the individual level.

It took me three days of arguing with myself to finally see the fallacy of group selection thinking and realize that natural selection must indeed work for individual advantage. It was almost as if I’d been struck by lightning. I used to joke that I was tempted to grab people on the Boston subway and yell, “Do you know what's wrong with group selection thinking?” In other words, I became a complete convert and a fanatic since so many things were revealed if you had to interpret them at the individual level but which remained obscure if you thought they were selected to benefit the group or the species, as so many other disciplines implicitly did.

Within a year I decided to become a biologist. I returned to Harvard to take one year as a special student studying eight biology courses to make up for the absence of any biology in my earlier education. I was then admitted to graduate school. I could not have Drury as my advisor because he was not on the faculty so my advisor became Ernest Williams, an expert on lizards, especially tree climbing lizards of the genus Anolis. He took me to Jamaica and also Haiti on a memorable visit, watching lizards that he was capturing and then euthanizing quickly and preserving them to carry back to Harvard to add to its herpetological collections.

I did my thesis on social theory based on natural selection. The first two chapters were later published as, “The evolution of reciprocal altruism” and “Parental investment and sexual selection.” But Harvard required that theoretical theses also have at least one empirical chapter. This chapter was written on the Jamaican green lizard and to study them I had to make repeated visits to Jamaica. This set up a lifelong bond between me and Jamaica.

I used to joke when asked by fellow students why I had such a fascination for Jamaica: “I took one look at the women, a second look at the island, and decided if I had to molest lizards to pay for frequent trips to Jamaica I would humble myself and become a lizard man and that is exactly what I did”. Eventually it led to marriage to a telegraph operator who traveled throughout the island when she was assigned to different offices. This was 50 years ago before there were telephones in the countryside so I got to know many cities in Jamaica: Santa Cruz, Mandeville, Montego Bay, Ocho Rios, Port Antonio, and others. I would see her in the evening, and in the daytime when she was working I would travel into the surrounding countryside. I soon enough brought her to the US on a fiancés visa and we married in Boston and had four children, including twin girls. She was recently deceased due to brain cancer that had metastasized from her original breast cancer to colonize both her brain and her liver—a very painful death to witness and experience.

In short, I began my academic work as a student of Mathematics and US history, both insufficient to capture my attention for a lifetime of work, but it led me to Bill Drury and evolutionary biology. Drury was a superb one-on-one teacher and naturalist. I remember watching herring gulls with him through binoculars and I proposed an explanation for their behavior that was manifestly maladaptive. There was a pause and then Bill said, “Never assume the animal you are studying is as stupid as the one studying it”. As I say, he was a wonderful teacher—how could you not love a man like that?!

I am now 78 years old, creeping toward 79. I still work on social theory based on natural selection, most recently the evolutionary logic of so-called “honor killings.” As for empirical work, in 1996 I started the Jamaican Symmetry Project, with the help primarily of John Manning (UK) and Gordon Getty (USA). Now 28 articles and counting, it is the only long-term study in humans of either fluctuating asymmetry or the 2^nd-4^th digit ratio (1997–2021).