Erik Baker Erik Baker is a historian at Harvard University and the author of Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America. He is Senior Editor at The Drift. 

The Cure and the Disease | Social Darwinism from AIDS to Covid-19

Erik Baker

It was not how anyone expected Bill Hamilton to die. In 1999, Hamilton was celebrating his fifteenth year as a research professor in evolutionary biology at Oxford, where he had cultivated a reputation for unconventional, mathematically sophisticated theorizing. He had recently received both the Crafoord Prize and the Kyoto Prize, arguably the two most prestigious awards for scientists in fields not eligible for the Nobel. His wife had moved out,...