George R. Price

George Robert Price (* 1922 - January 6, 1975 in London ) was an American population geneticist . Trained as a chemist , teaching and science journalist, he went to London in 1967, where he worked as a theoretical biologist at the Galton Laboratory at University College London . Three important contributions to evolution and selection are ascribed to him:

• Extension of the work of William D. Hamilton about kin selection (kin selection) by the Price formula
• Introduction of the concept of evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) together with John Maynard Smith , a central concept of evolutionary game theory
• Formalization of Ronald Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection

Life

The father was an electrician and died when George was four years old. His mother was a former opera singer. The family struggled through the Great Depression . He had an older brother, Edison. After attending a public school in New York City , Price received a degree in chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1943 . In 1946 he received his PhD from the same university after working on the Manhattan Project . In 1947 he married Julia Madigan. Their relationship was tense, as George was a staunch atheist and his wife a practicing Catholic. They had two daughters, Annamarie and Kathleen, and they divorced in 1955.

Between 1946 and 1948 Price was a chemistry teacher at Harvard University and a consultant for the Argonne National Laboratory . Between 1950 and 1957 he was a research fellow in medicine at the University of Minnesota . Among other things, he worked on fluorescence microscopy and liver perfusion. In 1955 and 1956 he published two articles in Science magazine , in which he criticized the pseudo-scientific claims of extrasensory perception . As a science journalist, he attempted to write a book about the US Cold War with the Soviet Union and China called No Easy Way . But he complained that the world was changing faster than he could write about it. So his book never ended.

From 1962 to 1967 he was employed by IBM as a consultant for graphic data processing. In 1966 he was treated for thyroid cancer. The removal of the tumor left his shoulder partially paralyzed and he remained dependent on thyroxine treatment. With the money from his insurance, he went to England in 1967 to start a new life.

William D. Hamilton couldn't remember when Price first visited him in 1996. He remembered Price reading his paper on kin selection . With no training in population genetics or statistics, he developed the Price equation , a covariance equation that indicated the change in the allele frequency of a population. Although the first part of the equation had previously been derived by Alan Robertson and CC Li , the second part of the equation allowed its application to all types of selection and evolution.

On June 6, 1970, Price had a religious experience and then passionately studied the New Testament. He believed that there had been too many fortunes in his life. In particular, he wrote an extensive essay, The Twelve Days of Easter , in which he stated that the events surrounding the death of Jesus of Nazareth were actually longer during Easter week. He later turned away from Bible study and devoted his life to social work, helping the needy in north London and giving all of his material possessions to the poor. He passed away by suicide in 1975 .

Fisher's Fundamental Theorem

Through his work, Price shed light on Fisher's Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection , which had caused much controversy and misunderstanding. He believed that his equation (the Price equation) was a gift from God, a miracle in his religious experience. He supported the homeless by making his house available. Sometimes when the people in his house were too bothering him, he slept in his office. Due to a construction project, he finally had to leave his rented house, which made him very unhappy as he could no longer provide accommodation for the homeless. He moved to various homes in north London, where he eventually killed himself in 1975 by slitting his throat with nail scissors. Friends said that he killed himself out of desperation because he could no longer help the homeless.

A memorial service was held for Price in Euston (not a church). Hamilton and Maynard Smith were the only people present from the college; the few other mourners were acquaintances he had met through social work. Price's contributions were then overlooked for twenty years as he had only worked in theoretical biology for a short time and published little. This changed in recent years through the biography James Swartz wrote of him and through the articles by Steve Frank.

Fonts

• GR Price: Science and the supernatural . In: Science , 122, 1955, pp. 359-367.
• GR Price: Where is the definitive experiment? In: Science , 123, 1956, pp. 17-18.
• GR Price: Selection and Covariance . In: Nature , 227, 1970, pp. 520-521.
• GR Price: Extension of the Hardy-Weinberg law to assortative mating . In: Annals of Human Genetics , 23, 1971, pp. 344-347
• GR Price, Cedric Smith : Fisher's Malthusian parameter and reproductive value . In: Annals of Human Genetics , 3, 1972, pp. 1-7
• GR Price: Fisher's “fundamental theorem” made clear . In: Annals of Human Genetics , 36, 1972, pp. 129-140.
• GR Price: Extension of Covariance Selection Mathematics . In: Annals of Human Genetics , 35, 1972, pp. 485-490.
• John Maynard Smith , GR Price: The logic of animal conflict . In: Nature , 246, 1973, pp. 16-18.
• GR Price: The nature of selection . In: Journal of Theoretical Biology , 64, 1995, pp. 278–285 (written circa 1971)

literature

• SA Frank: George Price's contributions to Evolutionary Genetics. In: Journal of Theoretical Biology. 175, 1995, pp. 373-388, abstract and full text (PDF; 412 kB), stevefrank.org
• SA Frank: The Price Equation, Fisher's fundamental theorem, kin selection, and causal analysis . In: Evolution , 51, pp. 1712-1729 PDF
• SA Frank: Price, George . In: M. Pagel (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Evolution , 2002, pp. 930-931, PDF
• William D. Hamilton : The genetic evolution of social behavior I and II . Journal of Theoretical Biology 7, 1964, pp. 1-16, 17-52, PMID 5875341 , PMID 5875340 .
• WD Hamilton: Narrow Roads of Gene Land vol 1. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996, ISBN 0-7167-4530-5 , especially Chapters 5 and 9
• James Swartz: Death of an Altruist: Was the man who found the selfless gene too good for this world? In: Lingua Franca , 2000, 10.5, pp. 51-61

Web links

• Photography by George R. Price