Add MS 89467

A series of three letters sent to American evolutionary biologist, Stephen C Stearns by British evolutionary biologist, William D Hamilton. The letters are dated: October 12, 1979; December 19, 1979 (both typed); May [18], 1980 (handwritten).

The 1979 letters, concern a proposed visit to Reed College, Portland, Oregon that Hamilton eventually undertook in 1980. The 1980 letter; in reply to one from Stearns, followed a three day road trip that Stearns and Hamilton had taken through Oregon, after the visit to Reed College, during which Hamilton had talked at length about his relationship with the British evolutionary biologist, John Maynard Smith.

Part transcript of the 1980 letter:

Dear Steve,… Thanks for your recent letter. Regarding Maynard Smith I would like to be able to forget my grudge and do feel that I am acting in bad spirit in maintaining it when he praises my work so much and seems to be eager to make up for any past injustices. However, I can’t get it out of my head that his anecdote about Haldane was a calculated injustice – an attempt to explain (when people started to ask him about this) how he came to climb aboard the band-wagon of kin-selection etc with apparently no incentive from me. Both because I feel I have reasonable grounds for believing that the anecdote was a lie (mainly because he seemed quite unaware of anything Haldane had written or said about altruism, and to have no interest himself in the subject either, when I was introduced to him at U.C. in 1960 or 61) and because it is simply acutely painful to have the words that I produced – after struggling for three years to make sure they were true – put into Haldane’s mouth and now treated by everyone as if this was their real source. I find it very hard to forgive him. I feel now in fact that I would never succeed in feeling at ease and unresentful in his presence, perhaps not even if he were to take the unlikely step of admitting that the anecdote might have been a false memory involving a comparison with what he had read in my manuscripts. But I do try hard to treat him fairly with regard to his own contributions to our common field, in citing his papers, recommending them to students, and so on. Basically I do not think of him as worse than many other scientists, especially with the “determined to be eminent” category to which I feel he tends to belong, and indeed it seems he may be more conscientious about injustices to others than many. I feel that when he found himself in an awkward position with regard to me and tried to get out of it he perhaps didn’t realise how much what he supposed to be a small distortion of the truth would hurt me (he did often drink with Haldane in the Green Lion pub; Haldane did talk about anything and had, as shown in the New Biology article, worked on special cases of the kinship principle, had been interested in altruism for a long time … etc.) Well, as you can see you have started me on a topic in which I am probably a bit paranoid, so I had better shut up. Your intention in writing that note is appreciated anyway.… Best wishes, Bill