This is a question the American thinker George Price tried to answer. He was a chemist and mathematician, first an atheist, then a believer who ended his life as a derelict. Oren Harman, professor of the history of science at Bar Ilan University in Israel, wrote a book about him – The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness.
Harman presents a wealth of scientific research bearing on diverse forms of cooperation, helpfulness, even self-sacrifice among many species. Altruism was “an anomalous thorn in Darwin’s side,” Harman observed, a conundrum that Darwinians would need to solve, given their view of the ruthless struggle among living beings for survival.
Here are some of the questions raised:
Why do amoebas build stalks from their own bodies, sacrificing themselves in the process, so that some may climb up and be carried away from dearth to plenty on the legs of an innocent insect or the wings of a felicitous wind? Why do vampire bats share blood, mouth to mouth, at the end of a night of prey with members of the colony who were less successful in the hunt? …And what do all of these have to do with morality in humans – is there, in fact, a natural origin to our own acts of kindness?
Clearly, Oren Harman thinks the answer is yes, but there is as yet no scientific proof. As to George Price, after an extraordinary life of scientific and religious struggles, he cut a gash in his throat in January 1975 and bled to death on the floor of a desolate squat in London. Among the notes he left, one read: “To Whom It May Concern: I guess I’ve had it. George.”
Source: The American Scholar, Autumn 2010
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
