Er war gelernter Chemiker, arbeitete im Manhatten-Projekt, als Journalist und bei IBM. 1967 wandte er sich der Evolutionsbiologie zu. Seine Publikationsliste ist kurz, aber voll von bahnbrechenden Erkenntnissen, wie zum Beispiel der Price-Gleichung. Diese beschreibt, wie sich Gene von einer auf die andere Generation verbreiten.
Bald darauf kovertierte Price zum Christentum und verbrachte den Rest seines Lebens damit, den Armen zu helfen. 1975 starb er durch seine eigene Hand in einem besetzten Haus in der Nähe von London.
Sein Werk ist zwischendurch fast in Vergessenheit geraten.
Die frühen Jahre
Die Ehe von George Price ging in die Brüche, weil Price militanter Atheist war, seine Frau aber überzeugte Christin. Nach seiner Scheidung versuchte sich Price als Journalist. Aus Spieltheoretischen Überlegungen heraus schlug er vor, daß die USA jedem Bürger in der Sowjetunion zwei Paar guter Schuhe kaufen sollten. Im Gegenzug sollte die UdSSR Ungarn freigeben. Ein geplantes Buch über die russische nukleare Bedrohung hat er nicht fertiggestellt, weil er die sowjetische Position zur Abrüstung als überzeugender empfandt.
In 1955, the year of his divorce, Price published his first magazine piece, a long article in Science in which he questioned the quality of the evidence used to demonstrate ESP. It was the first of several highly visible, and often farsighted, forays into journalism. The following year Price published "How to Speed Up Invention" in Fortune magazine. In the age of punched cards and Teletypes, the article described in detail a hypothetical "design machine," which would feature a graphic display, a cursorlike light pen, and a mouselike device to rotate, shrink, and enlarge shapes.
In 1957, Price sent Senator Hubert Humphrey an early draft of an essay he was writing for Life titled "Arguing the Case for Being Panicky." The article warned that a decline in U.S. military strength could lead to catastrophe, and it so impressed Humphrey that the two men went on to exchange dozens of letters. Price told Humphrey about several novel foreign policy ideas he had derived from game theory. He suggested, for example, that the United States offer to buy every Russian citizen two pairs of high-quality shoes (at a cost of $2 billion) in exchange for the liberation of Hungary. The same year, Price began to write a book on the Soviet threat for Doubleday, which he abandoned in 1959 when he concluded that the Soviet position on disarmament was more commendable than the U.S. position.
Nach einer mißglückten Operation an seinem Schilddrüsen-Krebs erhielt er eine Ausgleichszahlung seiner Krankenversicherung. Mit dem finanziellen Polster ging Price 1966 nach London, und begann als Mitt-Vierziger seine Karriere als Evolutionsbiologe.
Price-Gleichung
Price kam auf eine Gleichung, die die Häufigkeit von Merkmalen in der Elterngeneration mit der Häufigkeit in der Kindergeneration verbindet anhand ihrer Fitness. Seine Gleichung ist die Formulierung evoutionärer Populationsdynamik.
Price hatte William Hamiltons Arbeiten über Verwandtenselektion - kin selection - gelesen. Kin selection war damals ein heißes Thema - und ist es noch. Man kennt es auch als "inclusive Fitness" - wenn du den Kinder deiner Geschwister hilfst, dann hilfst du auch deinen eigenen Genen. Das hat man als Gegenbeweis zur Gruppenselektion angesehen. In der Price-Gleichung ist das nur ein Spezialfall unter vielen Fällen der Gruppenbildung.
Price hat Hamilton darauf angesprochen.
Hamilton meanwhile had returned from Brazil, and in late July 1969, Price contacted him again. Nearly a year had elapsed since their last communication. In his letter, Price gently explained that Hamilton's formulation of nepotistic altruism did not work quite the way Hamilton thought it did. He generously offered to spare Hamilton the awkwardness of being corrected publicly. "I did want -- in view of your friendly correspondence, because I respected your work, and because everyone makes a mistake now and then -- to publish in a way that would not embarrass you," Price wrote. He left a telephone number and the times he could be reached.
...
Despite the strain in their first conversation, Hamilton quickly grasped the significance of Price's covariance equation and soon found himself won over. "I am enchanted with the formula derived in your manuscript," he wrote to Price in December 1969. A month later he'd begun to rethink the issue of group selection. "In its general form, I can see how one might use your formula to investigate group selection,'" he wrote.
Wie man The Nature aufs Kreuz legt.
Hamilton war es schwer gefallen seine frühen Arbeiten zu publizieren. Deshalb half er Price, dessen Arbeit zu veröffentlichen. Der Plan war, daß zuerst Price seinen Artikel einsenden sollte. Eine Woche später würde dann Hamilton einen Artikel einsenden, der auf dem von Price aufbaute. Die Arbeit von Price wurde abgelehnt, die Arbeit von Hamilton wurde angenommen. Worauf Hamilton sagte: "Ich kann meine Arbeit nicht ohne die von Price veröffentlichen."
Although Price's equation was strikingly original, its publication, which would be Price's first in his new field, was by no means assured. Hamilton, who had felt isolated and unappreciated while working out his theory of nepotistic altruism, was anxious to help his friend avoid a similar fate. Together they devised a clever strategy to break into Nature, one of the premier science journals. Price would submit his paper on the mathematics of natural selection first. One week later, Hamilton would submit a paper that depended on Price's formula to re-derive his theory of inclusive fitness.
It came as no surprise when Price's paper was returned immediately. The editors had not seen fit to send it out for review. No less surprising, the paper by Hamilton, a well-established name, was accepted without delay. According to plan, Hamilton wrote Nature to withdraw his paper. He explained that he had made use of a "powerful new method," and he could not in good conscience publish his results until the method he used was published. The plan went off without a hitch; Nature promptly reconsidered. Price's "Selection and Covariance" was received on November 12, 1969, and published on August 1, 1970. Befitting its entirely original approach, the paper appeared without citations.
Bekehrung
Am 7ten Juni 1970 gibt Price nach und außerdem zu, daß es Gott gibt. Price "forscht" über die Unterschiede zwischen den vier Evangelien.
EARLY IN THE summer of 1970, at the age of forty-seven, Price underwent a sudden religious conversion. "On June 7th I gave in and admitted that God existed," he explained to friends. He viewed his conversion as a logical necessity, the result of a series of coincidences that had befallen him. After calculating the odds of their occurrence and finding them to be "astronomically low," he was convinced that there had been supernatural manipulation.
Over the course of the next year, Price's scientific work was accompanied by a new passion -- biblical exegesis. Adopting a highly literal approach to the Bible, Price set out to reconcile discrepancies among the four Gospels. Nearly a year after his conversion, he completed a fifty-page article, "The Twelve Days of Easter," which proposed to replace the traditional eight-day Holy Week with a new chronology. He believed he had resolved several of the long-standing puzzles of biblical scholarship.
Die späten Jahre
1972 lief seine Forschungsstelle aus. Price orientierte sich fortan an der Bergpredigt. Seine Forschungen setzte er gelegentlich fort.
IN JUNE 1972, the three-year grant that Price had obtained from the Science Research Council came to an end, and he chose not to seek to renew it. He preferred to give more time to his Christian work and less to mathematical genetics. By the fall, Price had decided to live according to his literal interpretation of the teaching of Jesus. Inspired by Jesus' advice in the Sermon on the Mount to take no heed of the morrow, Price was pushing himself to the brink of disaster. He was almost joyous in anticipation of the extreme deprivation that his faith had brought upon him. "I am now down to exactly fifteen pence," he wrote to Maynard Smith that October. "I look forward eagerly to when that fifteen pence will be gone."
In the little time that remained after doing his Christian work, Price continued his genetics research ... But by the end of the year, he was forced to avoid the lab because his charity cases were causing disturbances there. In one incident, a belligerent alcoholic (whose abused wife Price had been protecting) pissed publicly on the front steps of the genetics building, smashed a bike lamp, and scattered the contents of a student's satchel while shouting obscenities. Fortunately, Price's recent paper with Maynard Smith in Nature had earned him credit with the lab authorities. As he wrote to his daughter Annamarie, "I expect that one cover-illustrated lead article in Nature compensates for one urination at the front entrance to the building."
Es heißt, daß George Price alles hergegeben hat, was er materiell besaß. Am Ende lebte er in einem besetzten Haus in den Vorstädten von London. Dort hat er sich dann auch die Kehle durchgeschnitten.
From a London student's newspaper entitled Jesus' hot-line
A prominent genetics researcher at University College Hospital gave up everything including his life for his religious beliefs, St' Pancras Coroner's Court was told last week. Dr. George Price gave away all his money, clothes and possessions to homeless alcoholics and left his flat in Bloomsbury to live as a squatter in Drummond Street, Kentish Town. It was there that he was found dead.
http://stevefrank.org/reprints-pdf/95JTB-Price.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._Price
http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/ ... ruist.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-slo ... 06248.html
). Und das ich als Individuum in einer "fitten" Population mehr Chancen habe meine Gene weiter zu geben, als in einer "unfitten" ist auch klar (Nahrungskonkurrenz, Nischen etc). Soweit ich das verstanden habe reicht die klassische Evolutionstheorie auch in vielen Fällen aus die Entstehung und Konkurrenz von Population weitgehend zu erklären, allerdings auch an Grenzen stößt (s. z.B.: 
Mal Google fragen.
