The Price Of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness

by Oren Harman

From its lowly beginnings in some primordial soup through slime mold to ant to antlered deer to inquisitive monkey, the story of the search for goodness climbs all the way from the oceans and the jungles to titanic twentieth-century battles between systems of government and economics. From the promise of democracy and the free market to communism and the hope of equality, and from the liberations and perils of individualism to the inebriation of nationalism and unity, the quest to crack the altruism code traces an epic voyage. From baboons fighting in trees, to the Russian Revolution, to Nazi Germany, to the atom bomb, to twenty-first-century neurogenetics and brain imaging today, it is mankind’s soaring, Sisyphean journey to return to the paradise of the Garden of Eden.

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