Wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. See? And NPR. Alright.
Okay, so let's just do the open. Hey, I'm Jada Bumran. I'm Robert Krollich. This is Radio Lab.
And today we're going to be talking, well, let's do it this way. Which way? I was at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, getting a spot for cool people with new books. And that particular is Richard Dawkins.
They like him too. Don't make it so easy for him. I decided to begin. This is a real problem for a lot of people.
By quoting him to him. You write, I don't know if it's in this book or some other, the total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose the sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, disease, it must be so. If there's ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.
Darwin was worried by the same thing. Darwin recognized the total horror of the suffering in nature. It was one of the things that actually made him lose his faith. But he also realized that it's not just a fact that it happens.
It's intrinsic to natural selection that it must happen. And when you look at a beautiful animal like a cheetah that appears to be beautifully designed for something, like a cheetah is amazingly well designed, apparently, for catching gazelles. And gazelles are amazingly well designed for escaping from cheetahs. We are the end products of a sort of evolutionary arms race, in which thousands of millions of animals have died.
The shaping, the carving of the shape of a cheetah or a gazelle has come about through millions of unsuccessful gazelles being caught, and the successful ones making it through, only to be caught later probably, but after reproducing and passing on the genes that helped them to escape. So the sheer number of deaths that lie behind the sculpting of these beautiful creatures is horrifying, and at the same time it's got a kind of savage beauty. Why did you blame this exactly? Well, because I was sitting there thinking, I know that cheetahs chasing eat antelopes, but wasn't there a nice cheetah once?
That went over to the antelope and said, hi, have a sandwich together, and maybe something about the cheetah and had something to do with an act of kindness? I can't imagine this. So you're thinking that maybe it's not just meanness that can sculpt, but maybe niceness can sculpt too? Exactly.
Niceness as a scalpel. Niceness as a scalpel? Ooh, I want to listen to that show. Wait a second, we are that show.
We should do it then. Let's do it. Today on Radiolab. Goodness.
Kindness. Selflessness. Altruism. If the world is so cruel, how do you account for it?
Yeah, how should we think about it? And when you do see generosity, how do you know what's really generous? Sorry, so we're going to start the show with a story that sort of embodies the last question you asked about a guy named George Price, who was a mathematician we never heard of until our producer, Lynn Levy, told us about him. She heard about him from an author or in Harmon, who wrote a book called The Price as in George Price, a vulture.
You know, this is a high school photo. So the people on the radio can't see the picture, so describe what he looks like. Well, he looks a bit like sort of some kind of Scandinavian prince in the 17th century. Good looking guy.
Totally. Definitely something about this guy's eyes. His eyes. This was described to me by a number of people who knew when he had a gaze that you sort of walked away from at your own peril.
There was something that, you know, he sort of knew things. You could start Georgia's story anywhere, but let's start in 1943. George graduates from college, and he's this very kinetic kind of guy. Really athletic.
He'd swim in the surf and he did a lot of rock climbing. And by all accounts, he was incredibly brilliant. And right after college, he starts to kind of bounce through history. He was all over the place.
First place he ends up is the Manhattan Project on Uranium Enrichment. So he's working as a chemist on the atom bomb. When he was done with that. After a couple of years, he made a 90 degree turn and started working at Bell Labs on transistor research.
Solved some very basic problems there and then disappeared like a phantom, started working at a medical center on on college research. Meaning cancer. And I remember going to his lab, playing hide and seek, all these bottles and taps to the lab. By this time, George had a wife and two kids.
You look under the microscope at slides of blood. Hannah and Kathleen. But he never really saw them that much. She'd worked 56 hours straight without sleeping on benzodram.
I remember he was always gone a lot. When the kids were still pretty young. We were like five and six. He left his family.
Yeah. Just left. Turned another 90 degree corner and began working on computer aided design. In fact, he invented computer aided design.
He was firing in all directions. What do you think was driving him to keep moving from thing to thing? He just wanted to succeed at any cost. It made no difference in what field.
And at one point in time, he was corresponding with about five Nobel laureates each in a different field. He wanted to have one great discovery that would make his name. So that's George. Wow.
Quite a guy. Very interesting guy. So what happens next? So next, what happens is he gets on a boat and he goes to London.
What was this by the way? It's November 1967. And in London, that's where things for our purposes start to really happen. Why would happen to London?
Well, he starts looking for this question. He goes from library to library. There are 13 libraries that he would hang out at. And the question that he finds for himself, which is weird considering his personal history, is...
Why family? Like, why do people have families? Like, why do families stick together? There are a lot of dynamics within the family where it would make more sense for an individual to break out.
No, go it alone. Like he has. And yet, family persists. And there should be a good reason for it.
He even wrote about the question to his daughter? Dear Kathleen, my big paper will be on the evolutionary origin of the human family. In most species, the father just mates with the mother and she does all the child rearing herself. But in the human species, the dominant pattern has involved care by adult males toward their own children.
Why did our species evolve this way? It just brings back what kind of a father our father was towards us. And basically, there was kind of the benign neglect. But this question, why family was only the beginning?
Why family led him to a bigger question? Which is, why does anybody help anybody? What do you mean? If you think about Darwin's idea of survival of the fittest, think about what that really means.
It means if you are a creature, you have two big important jobs. You've got to survive and you've got to be fit. Right. What do you mean?
Fitness really means how many babies can you make? How many babies are you making? And so if you do some stupid, you know, hair-brained thing that means you can't stay alive and or you can't make babies, that doesn't make any sense. Right.
And yet, wherever you look in nature, you see creatures doing us. From bacteria to insects, birds, ants and wasps, fish. I'll give you an example. There's a species of amoeba called dyscotelium discordium, which usually the amoeba sort of lives on its own.
It's a single-celled organism in the forest. But when resources are low, what it does is it sends out this chemical signal. And all the other amoeba who are also single-celled. They start sending out signals.
And they start sort of crawling until they all meet. And they become one slug, which is now a single organism. And this slug begins to sort of move along until it finds a place that's windy and sunny, at which point? It stops.
And the top 20% of the slug, the top 20% of meba in the head of the slug, begin to create, out of their own body, a stalk. Which hardens. And they die while doing so. But the stalk allows the bottom 80% to climb up the stalk and to create an orb at the top of the stalk.
And from there, all the amoeba that aren't, you know, dead, they can catch a wind. To better pastures. It's like a dandelion. So what's happened is that the top 20% have really sacrificed themselves for the back 80%.
And that's an amoeba. So you figure what the hell is happening here? This was a great mystery to Darwin and Darwin said this is in fact the greatest mystery and the greatest riddle. And if I can't answer it, then my theory isn't worth anything.
And for a hundred years when people talked about evolution, this thing altruism was the elephant in the room. So we were curious about this. How might you take this elephant, this niceness thing that seems to be everywhere and shove it back into the mean old theory of evolution? And it's got to be a way.
So we called up Carl Zimmer, who's a journalist we have on the show quite often, and writes a lot about evolution. And he told us in the 1960s, just as George Price was starting to ask these questions, some scientists came up with a new way of thinking about altruism. I thought I'd extreme it, which he ran it through. Okay.
So Robert, do you have siblings? I have a sister. Okay, you have a sister. Okay, let's just imagine that you guys are home from college saying.
Okay. And there's a flood at the Carl Witch Manor. And the water flooding around and you can see that your sister is about to die. If you save your sister's life and you die in the process, your genes, Robert Carl, which is genes, are gone.
Right, this is the problem. Yes. But you and your sister have the same parents. Yes.
So your sister has 50% of your genes. So if I rescue her, then half my genes survive? Right, 50% move on. Now if you had a sister and a brother, and you save them both, then you each have 50%.
So it's a wash. And so it's effectively, it's like saving Robert Carl, which in his entirety. Mathematically speaking. Mathematically speaking, right.
Can you do this with cousins? Yeah, actually. If you step it back to cousins. What percentage of that's a quarter in the case of the first cousins?
It's an eight. So you have to have eight cousins. Eight cousins to equal my full genome. Right.
Yeah. Do you have that many? I have 32 third cousins and that's why I always round them up at a rodeo, if you can. And you place them all together.
You guys stay here in case something happens to me. But here's what I don't get. Like how does this actually operate? Like Robert's not going to sit there while the man is flooding.
Well, let's see. Right. Cousin, that's eight. That's eight.
No, you understand. The math has already been done. The math has already been done. The math has been done by evolution on genes.
And those are the genes you've got. Oh, so you're saying that evolution has turned the math into an instinct. Yeah, you got it. I don't think I get it.
What is the instinct here? I know I want to save my sister. Yeah, well, so here's how I understand it. Since Sis has half your genes and since second cousin only has a 30 second, theoretically your instinct to save your Sis should be 16 times stronger than your instinct.
No, that's actually roughly proportionally correct. But keep in mind, this was just an idea. It's just a thought experiment. Until our guy, George Price, comes along and writes an equation which shows mathematically how an instinct like this could evolve.
It's very powerful. Okay, so, well, do you want me to just read the letters? Yeah. What is the equation?
What equals what? Okay, so it's W times delta Z equals the covariance of W i comma Z i plus E. We call it E, W i delta Z i. Oh, of course.
Yeah. There you go. It was complicated. I mean, it was simple a second ago.
No, it sounds a little complicated. He's not just dealing with a simple setup. It's like he's got the traits and how they affect the different groups and how things change over time. So it's a big.
There's a lot going on in there. Okay. Do you understand what you just said? Not.
So here, this is a really interesting letter. When he did write the equation, he walked off the street into the university. In University College of the University of London. In London.
Complete unknown. He just moved from America. No one knew who he was. I went to talk to a professor Smith.
And he showed the equation to the professor and said, is this new? I felt sure that someone must have discovered it before. The professor looked at it and after a very, very short amount of minutes, gave him an honorary professorship. Keys.
And a keys to an office. One of the best genetic departments in the world. So George is sitting in his office. Which by the way is on the site of Darwin's old house.
Whoa. And he's made this big discovery. And he's thinking. Thinking.
Thinking. Thinking. Thinking philosophically about what it all meant. Thinking.
Thinking. If I can write a formal mathematical treatment of the evolution of a trait like altruism, what it means about the trait is that the trait is never really purely altruistic. If making a sacrifice helps me in the end or helps my genes. Certainly selfishness in the skies.
Yeah. If that's true. The world is a terrible place. Because that means that there's no true, there could never be true selflessness in the world.
My math means that there cannot ever be true selflessness. And I can't accept a world like that. Why could he suddenly not accept a world like that? Yeah, I don't know.
Orrin thinks it might be because. Precisely because he had been so selfish for most of his life. And so he decided in his own life to embark on a program of radical altruism that would prove that there was true selflessness in school. And that's what led him to the streets of London.
In search of homeless people, derelicts, down and outs. And he began by sort of just walking up to them, introducing himself, hello, my name is George. What's your name? How can I help you?
It's random people on the street. Yeah. Everywhere I go I keep running into down and out alcoholics. To whom I give when I have anything and with whom I sit and drink from their bottle if they offer me a drink.
He buy people sandwiches or give them a few pounds. Whether it's by giving them money, cleaning a filthy kitchen. And then it got bigger. He started giving out keys to his place.
Inviting these guys into his home. People were coming and going. He was eating them food, clothes. And after a few months of charity like that, he was out of money.
There was one letter that he had written to John Meinart Smith, another great biologist of the era. Which said, John, I'm down to my last 15 P and I can't wait to get rid of the last 15. He thought he was proving his equation wrong. So by getting poorer and poorer and giving away all this stuff, he was somehow negating the thing his math seemed to say was inevitable.
The selfish instinct. Yeah, you know, he had this self-preservation instinct. And he was going to fight the self-preservation instinct and he was going to win. To sort of beat the mathematics that he himself had written.
So he was approaching it almost like a math proof. Yeah. He ran out of money. He ran out of money.
George moved out of his apartment and into this abandoned house in a part of London called Tormor Square. Which one does it volume for my headphones? Which is where he met Sylvia. It was rough.
They were just poles holding the walls up, some places had walls. She was a young artist also squatting at the time. And the buildings were crumbling. You know, people had made makeshift staircases.
And George had like a room? Well, a few clothes on the floor. Not much. But you could see he was always thinking.
He would go around asking other people, does anybody have shoes? They don't want someone so needs a pair of shoes. You know, that would be part of it. But it might also be like if somebody was getting him to a doctor.
Because if you were homeless, it was very hard to have a doctor. But like I said, all this is going on at the same time. He was getting thinner and thinner. He was sitting little neck and these clothes had just hung around him.
He began writing letters to his daughters. Ah, apologizing. Weeping. Dear Henry, sorry I deserted you like that.
And I'm sorry I was such a poor father to you. I've been a terrible father. Looking at your picture now makes me wish I could do it all over again. Maybe where I come into the picture is...
I'm wrong to leave you in this. He wanted to begin again. She says George asked her to marry him over and over. First I thought it was kind of a joke, kind of a centroid.
We can't get mad, you know. She said no each time. And at a certain point he gave up. It's hard to really really remember.
But it was colder as a winter came on. You wouldn't see George as often. He became quieter I think. Just remember I'm quieter.
One morning this guy that was sharing a squat with George. Name is Shumulikatia. He was heading up the door. He found beneath the door as he was going out of the building.
He found beneath the door a letter. And since they were living in a squat he was afraid that this was some kind of eviction notice or something like that. He didn't read English. He couldn't read English.
So he ran up the stairs and knocked on George's door. George was the only one who could read English. And when he knocked the door sort of kind of went in a bit. And he could see in the aperture that there was blood all over the linoleum floor.
When he had enough of an opening he could see that George was sitting there with no blood left in his body. He killed himself. Yeah. And he was a very rare of scissors and cut through his carotid artery which is a very, very sort of terrible death.
Poor George. Thanks to producer Lynn Levy. For more on George Price be sure to read Orrin Harmon's book The Price of Altruism. And thanks also Carl Zimmer.
His latest is Michael Carson. We'll be right back. Hi this is Ann Lee Price. This is Camping Price.
Radio Lab is funded in part by the Alfred T. Sloan Foundation. Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.slone.org.
This is Orrin Calling. Radio Lab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR. This is Carl Zimmer. This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour Steve Kerr.
One of the best coaches in the NBA. And certainly one of the most outspoken. Calling the president of Bofun. I kind of regret that.
Even though I felt it in my heart because I'm representing a large group of people not only for our organization but our fans too. Steve Kerr joins us next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey this is Radio Lam.
I'm Janet Bemrond. I'm Robert Croatch. Our topic today is goodness. Goodness.
Selflessness. So we've done the math. The math leaves me a little on the cold side. I wonder why.
So you know what? Forget the math. Forget it. Let's go to the people who do the deeds.
You know people who do amazingly brave and heroic things. Yeah. No math required. Maybe find out, I don't know.
What makes them different than the rest of us? Yeah. That question led us. Oh.
Walter Kausky. It's a guy named Walter Ritkowski. I'm the executive director and secretary of the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission. Cool.
Well thanks for doing this. Can you just give us a little background on the Hero Fund? What is the Carnegie Hero Fund? The Carnegie Hero Fund is a private operating foundation that was established by Andrew Carnegie in 1904.
And what we do is recognize civilian heroism throughout the United States and Canada. By giving an award called the Carnegie Medal and the company in the Carnegie Medal is a financial grant. How much? Currently the amount is $5,000.
Wow. And how do you guys choose your heroes? We judge the heroic acts against a list of requirements. So then you have to have some kind of definition of hero which includes some and excludes others.
Yes. Perfect. But basic definition which is a civilian. One.
Meaning no military who voluntarily. Who leaves a point of safety. Three. To risk his own life or her own life or to an extraordinary degree.
Five. To attempt to save the life of another human. Six. How about seven.
Why? Can you read that one more time? Okay. I wasn't reading it.
Just came from memory. Oh, okay. What is it that happens in a person's mind at that pivotal moment when they decide to voluntarily. Leave a point of safety and risk their life to an extraordinary degree.
Save the life of another human. That's what we're going to know. Should we just jump in? Okay.
So the first one we have on our list is Laura Shreich. Okay. That's file number 73546 and the award number is 8,005. I am Laura Shreich.
I'm from Matt to Illinois and I currently live in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Oh, wow. Laura spoke with our producer Tim Hauer. Okay.
I've been here for a while. Yeah, 15 years. Back in the mid-90s. 1995.
It was a 21 year old college student. And I was driving through the country and I saw a woman getting mauled by a bull in a pasture. So she stopped to see what was going on. Jumped out and started yelling at her to see what I could do.
The woman was on the ground and the bull was. 950 pound Jersey bull. Tossing her in the air and back on the ground. Wow.
She was clearly struggling. And where were you? I was right on the other side of the fence but the fence was electric. So here's the moment that we find fascinating.
Laura can either go forward through thousands of volts of electricity toward an angry bull that will likely maul her too or she can stay safe. I went ahead and just climbed through the fence. And I don't remember ever feeling the electricity. She says by the time she got through.
Praisely enough. A neighbor had shown up and threw her a piece of pipe. Maybe about two feet long. I thought she approached the woman.
It was still conscious. The whole time she was yelling at me, hit the bull in the face as hard as you can and don't stop. So I'm going to straight up to the bull and beat it repeatedly. Look at this two foot length of tubing.
I think it distracted the bull and not where she was able to get out from under him. And as soon as we were outside the fence, looking back into the past certain bull was literally right there at the fence. Kick the ground a few times and snorted. He was not happy.
To a question. When you were there at that fence and you had the choice either stay put or to go through it, what was going through your mind? Was there a calculation there? No.
I can't really say that. You know what your options or anything like that? I did not. No.
It was just here's the problem. Here's what I need to do. And something needed to happen. So there's no choice moment?
Not that I recall. No. If nobody came to this woman's rescue she would die. Unfortunately, this is the usual explanation says Walter.
No explanation. I couldn't stand there and not do anything. I was compelled to act. I didn't really take the time to think about what else could happen.
I can't say ever really thought about my own life at that time. Okay, we just jumped ahead because we thought we'd try again. That's the voice of the next Carnegie hero that Walter told us about. Yeah, William David Pendle.
It was the 8,362 person to receive the Carnegie Medal. I produced her when Levy tracked him down. Bill, can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you.
William David Pendle was 37 years old at the time of his heroic act. Was it 1999? Yes. Early in the morning it was like 3.19 a.m.
in a small town near Pittsburgh. Bicksburg, Pennsylvania. In the Nongahayla, Pennsylvania. We was in bed sleeping and my wife heard a lot of crash.
I actually didn't hear it. My one dog was carrying on. So right away I run down there. Mr.
Pendle went outside his house. There was a very bad automobile accident. A car crashed head on into a utility pole. Flames was like rippling off the windshield off from under the hood.
He responded to the scene wearing only sweatpants. No shoes or sharders on the air chest. In the barefoot. So here we are.
Bill is standing in front of this ball of fire. There are three drunk teenagers inside that car that we doesn't know in. You can either A, do nothing. Or B, go in.
Through the driver's door. It is big for like slumptile to door. So I restain't wrap the door up around the chest. Pull him from the driver's seat out to the ground.
Meantime to the car was just like blazing. And my neighbor was there. She was taller than there's more of him in there. So I run back to the vehicle.
Found out the front seat passenger that was trapped in the wreckage. I finally got him loose and pulled him out. Apparently Mr. Pendle was aware that the third person was in the car.
A third young man. He was penal entered the car a third time. By then. It was hours blowing high flames and prone to about three feet above the car's roof.
The interior of the headliner of the car itself was dripping like plastic down on my back. I mean, I mean, they're screaming. You know, somebody getting a hand in there. But nobody would help.
And I reached in and grabbed the hole in the kid and was in the back. I was scruffing the neck and pulled him out. Alright, so when you were coming out of your house and you were looking at that car, what was going through your head? I was just trying to try to help.
I mean, I did what any normal person would do. I mean, you know, I just kept saying this is somebody's kid. You know what I mean? At the time, my daughter was like 16.
And I'm saying to myself, you know, if something, God forbid, whatever happened to her, that I would hope someone would be there to help. Did you ever talk to your neighbors and ask them why they didn't come in there? You know what, that's funny you brought that up because no, I've never brought it up. Never brought it up.
How come? I don't know, I guess. Maybe I probably wouldn't like their answer. I don't know.
I don't know why I've never asked them up. What do you think is the difference between you and those other people who just sort of stood by? I couldn't answer that. So our bull girl, she didn't know.
This guy didn't really know either. Somebody must be able to tell us something about what they were thinking at that moment that allowed them, that gave them the courage to do what they did. I can't give you a definite answer as to what propels people to do this, no. But we took one more shot with Walter.
He told us about a case that of all the cases he's heard, this is the one that puzzles him the most. It's the case of Wesley James Autry, a construction worker from New York 50-year-old man, who did jump into the track bed in a subway station to remove a fellow young man who had fallen onto the track. The gentleman was six foot hundred and eighty pounds. He was inert.
And yet Mr. Autry persisted despite the fact that a train was coming. There would come a point, at least in my estimation, where you would have to say, I have to get out of here because I'm going to be killed. I'm not suicidal.
But Mr. Autry didn't think that way. He and I part in this in this manner. What he did was he lay atop the victim between the rails while the train passed over them.
In the farthest reaches of my imagination, I can see myself jumping onto a subway track to attempt the rescue. What I can see myself doing is lying atop the victim while the train passes over me. Making this story even more nuts? When we finally met up with Wesley Autry on the platform where this incident happened under thirty-fifth and broadway, he explained to us that his daughter's had been with him.
They was okay. And at that time, my daughter was four and six and just this damn there. Oh, I'm dead. Show this picture.
Oh my God. Super cute. The one behind me is Shuki and this is the baby Sachi. So when they're standing there and this guy starts convulsing and then eventually falls off the platform onto the tracks right as a train is coming.
His choice is pretty stark. In order to save this complete stranger, he's got to leave his daughters behind. Potentially without a dad. I'm looking at him shaking and going into another seizure.
For some strange reason, a boy's out of nowhere says don't worry about your own, don't worry about your daughters. You can do this. So he jumps, runs to the guy. Is he conscious?
No. Tries to grab the guy's hand. And you see how my grab his hand? We'll slip apart.
You know, he slipped. I look up the train to get close. I grab his hand again. We'll slip apart.
Just train this close up. 50 feet, 20 feet, 10 feet, and that's right there. All you can do is grab the guy, get him in a bear hug and flatten his body against the guy as much as he can. The first train car just grazes my counts.
Train car went right over. When the train came to a stop, 45 cars passed over, I looked him in the eyes and said, excuse me, you seem to have a seizure or something. I don't know you. You don't know me.
So I just kept talking to him until he came through. And he was like, well, we don't get to train. He said, well, who are you? I said, I came now to save your life.
So he kept asking me, are we dead? I went heaven. I gave him a slight pinch on his arm. He said, oh, just I see you.
You're very much alive. Have you ever asked yourself what am I doing here? What am I doing here? What am I doing here?
I can hear the two ladies who have my daughters standing in between their legs. I can hear my daughters screaming. So when that train comes to a stop, I yell up underneath the train. Excuse me.
I'm the father. We're OK. I just want to let my daughters know that I'm OK because I know that they are worried about me. Everybody started clapping.
Can I ask you a question? So the point of which you said you heard a voice that said, I can do this. What is amazing to me? He left your daughters right here.
I forgot you don't know. He was a stranger, total stranger. But you know what? The mission wasn't contemplated.
I would chose for that. You felt chosen. I felt like I'm the chosen one. But for a religious person, though, I would wonder, why me?
Well, you know what? Maybe 20 years ago, I was supposed to be at a certain point. And then he explained to us exactly why he had jumped. He was the one guy who could.
He said right before his feet left the platform, this one specific moment from his life flashed mind. This thing that happened, you know, I had a gun pulled to my temple, but it was a misfire. So a gun was put to your head and you were almost dead for a second. I was dead.
So you think you might have been spirit for a purpose? I was dead for a reason. After that moment, he says when the gun went click and he didn't die. He always wondered why had God spared him that moment until he was on the platform and he saw the guy fall off.
He says then he knew. This is why I can do this. I can do this. I can do this.
That voice when that voice said that you're going to be okay. I knew everything was going to work out. You know what I think at the end of the day? What's that?
I don't think that there's an answer to the question we ask. I don't think you're a question. Why were you a hero? I don't think that any three of these here, I mean, the last one had the longest explanation.
He had been selected for some purpose, but does he know why he was falling? Well, I'm not a clue. See, I got a guy number three gives me something. What does he give you?
Okay, so the first two, right? They have no idea. This is just something in them that made them act. But guy number three is talking about circumstances.
Like the world prepared him for that moment. Serendipity. So it makes me think, well, what if circumstances are just right? Maybe any of us could do that.
I got a mailman. He used to say to me all the time. He says, how did you manage to do that over? How did you manage to put him kids out?
I don't know if I could have done that. I said, well, you know what? Don't say you wouldn't do this or you wouldn't do that until you're putting that situation. In fact, when we asked Walter, how many nominations do you get a year?
Are they hard to find? No, they are not hard at all to find. We are fortunate to be living in a society, regardless of what you hear elsewhere. We are fortunate to be living in a society where people do look out for others, even strangers.
He told us they'd even have to up their guidelines to make it harder to win. Simply because of the vast number of road deeds that happen in day-to-day life. Hi there, this is Spader Swydis calling from London, England. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P.
Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at WWW.D.L.D. That's the Federal Talk to Mr. Fuhrer.
Hey, this is Radio Lab, I'm Jad Abunrod. We'd like to say our topic, Robert. Our topic today is goodness. Niceness.
Or me, altruism. We've met a couple of folks, individuals who have struggled with altruism in some way. Now we're going to start pullback and go from specifics to grand global strategy. Hello.
Hello. Hello. And we're going to tell you a really cool story we think that begins with this guy. My name is Robert Axelrod.
I'm the Walgreen Professor for the Study of Human Understanding in the Department of Political Science and the Ford School of Public Policy of the University of Michigan. I know that's a mouthful. That was like your dean was looking over your sister. Well, you know, you could just say I'm a professor of public policy and political science or something.
Well, but before he was at all that, Axelrod was in high school. He was one of those guys who just loved computers. Well, yes, in 59-1960. He hung around the Northwestern University Computer Center.
59-60. So were those large beaches of furniture and refrigerated buildings? They were, in fact, the whole campus had one computer. And they let me use it for 15 minutes here and 15 minutes there.
What would you do with the computer? I did a very simple computer simulation of hypothetical life forms and environments for a science project. Really? You're a pre-geek is what you are.
Yes. I think you could say that. But then in 1962, when Axelrod was gathering a computer basement at somewhere, all over the world, everybody else was watching one of the great dramas in modern times. Good evening, my fellow citizens.
Unfold. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that in prison island. And Axelrod started thinking about the dilemma we were in.
Well, each side wants to spend more money buying missiles and things. You know, we could build more bombs, but then they could build more bombs. It would be better if they would both stop. But if we stop and they don't, that'd be bad.
Yeah. And so I was interested in what were the conditions that would allow people to get out of this problem. And then he starts thinking, well, wait, maybe I could use my computer to help me figure out what's a good strategy for this. For something like the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Well, yes. Right. And what made you think that computers could help with that? Well, I came across a simple game called the Prisoner's Dilemma.
Yeah. Noise from the window. Okay, so the Prisoner's Dilemma is a very famous thought experiment. It's a little tricky to describe, but I got a friend of mine, Andrew Zolli, who's written about the Prisoner's Dilemma in an upcoming book.
The resilience, the science of why it expands back. I got him to lay it out for me. What is the Prisoner's Dilemma? So imagine that two bank robbers are hanging out across the street from the First National Bank.
And the police pick them up. They've received a tip that these two guys are about to rob the bank. Yep. So the cops take these two guys back to the station, do the whole law and order thing, put them in different rooms.
And they walk into each one. Let's call them Lucky and Joe. And they say, to Lucky, we have enough to make sure that you go away for a six month sentence. But this is not really what the cops want.
They want a longer sentence for one of these guys, so they make Lucky an offer. You, Lucky, rat out Joe, and Joe doesn't say anything. You will go free, and Joe will go to jail for ten years. If the reverse happens.
Meaning if you say nothing and Joe rats you out. You're going to jail for ten years, and he's going to walk free. If you both end up ratting on each other, you both get five. Five years.
Whereas if you both keep your mouth shut. You're each going to jail for six months for loitering. So somehow if Lucky and Joe could talk to each other, they both say don't speak. Absolutely, but the big problem that Lucky and Joe have is they can't talk to each other.