When little differences matter a great deal
In the comment below Clark alludes to the fact that Jonathan Haidt kept reiterating that even if there were differences between populations due to recent evolution, if it was due to selection on standing variation upon quantitative traits then the betw…
Band of brothers at war
The fruits of human cooperation
The Pith: Human societies can solve the free rider problem, and generate social structure and complexity at a higher level than that of the band. That implies that much of human prehistory may have been characterized by…
We, Robot & Hamilton’s Rule
The original robots
We are haunted by Hamilton. William D. Hamilton specifically, an evolutionary biologist who died before his time in 2000. We are haunted because debates about his ideas are still roiling the intellectual world over a decade after h…
Can’t we all just get long: evolution of altruism edition
Samir Okasha is a philosopher of science and author of Evolution and the Levels of Selection. So his recent comment in Nature, Altruism researchers must cooperate, is informed by a scholarly background in these controversies. From what I can gather Okasha’s stance in this case is to “push back” on Nowak & Wilson in […]
The Price of Altruism
Sometimes in a narrative you have secondary characters who you want to revisit. What do to do after the story is complete? An convenient “work-around” to this problem is to find the story rewritten from the perspective of the secondary character. In broad strokes the picture is unchanged, but in the finer grained shadings different […]
Hamilton’s Rule vs. Increasing returns to cooperation
If you have even a marginal interest in evolutionary biology you will probably have heard of Hamilton’s Rule, a simple formal representation of the logic whereby a gene which favors altruism may spread through a population: rB > C, where r = coefficient of relatedness on the gene in question, B = benefit to those […]