Razib Khan

Category: Inclusive Fitness

  • 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…

  • Simple rules for inclusive fitness

    With the recent huge furor over the utility of kin selection I’ve been keeping a closer eye on the literature on inclusive fitness. The reason W. D. Hamilton’s original papers in The Journal of Theoretical Biology are highly cited is not some conspiracy, rather, they’re a powerful framework in which one can understand the evolution…

  • E. O. Wilson against Hamiltonian inclusive fitness

    There is a new paper in Nature which is a full frontal attack on the utility of William D. Hamilton’s inclusive fitness framework in explaining eusociality. Martin A. Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita, & Edward O. Wilson are the authors. Wilson is famous in large part for his authorship of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, and is…

  • 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…

Razib Khan