Re: Hamilton's Nonsense

From: Jim McGinn (jimmcginn_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 01/06/05 

Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 06:11:37 +0000 (UTC)

Perplexed in Peoria wrote:

<snip>

> > . . . you are wrong to
> > suggest that Hamilton was even cognizant of their
> > being other levels of selection than organism level.
> > Being blind to the existence of other levels of
> > selection Hamilton assumed that his rule provided the
> > only viable explanation for the existence of
> > altruistic behaviors.
>
> You seem to be very ignorant of a variety of historical facts.
>
> In 1964, Hamilton was part of an insurgency that was intent on
> denying the existence and/or importance of selection at any
> other level than organism-level.

Okay. Hardly matters to the point I'm making.
As you stated, Hamilton was intent on denying
the existence and/or importance of selection
at any other leve than organism-level.

> Your claim that he was not
> even cognizant of other levels is ludicrous - he was actively
> fighting the orthodoxy of that era which assumed (somewhat
> naively) that those other levels were important.

It would seem, if we read your words further
down on this same post, that he was unsuccessful
in this fight. In fact, if what you're saying
is accurate, he switched sided to accept levels
of selection other than just the organism level.
Isn't this essentially to concede that his
organism level version of Hamilton's rule (the
earlier version) is wrong?

<snip>

As you state:

> Hamilton jumped off the bandwagon
> by giving a multi-level selectionist derivation of the rule,
> based on the Price equation. Since then, it is generally
> understood that the multi-level selection model (a la Price)
> and the inclusive-fitness organism-level model of the 1964
> paper are simply two different ways of looking at the same
> phenomenon.

This makes no sense at all. If they both look
at the same phenomena and give two different
results then we know that at least one of them
must be wrong. Right?

> And, to Edser's unending confusion, Dawkins and
> others have come up with a third, gene-level selection way of
> looking at it from yet another perspective.

All three of which are invalid.

>
> It is all the same phenomenon, just looked at from three different
> angles. Hamilton contributed the key papers for two of those
> viewpoints. (Characteristically, Edser chooses to blame him for
> the third, gene-level viewpoint, which he actually had little
> to do with.)
>
> Was there a shift in Hamilton's thinking as to the viability of
> multi-level selection between 1964 and 1970? You better believe it!
> Did this shift in thinking mean that the 1964 logic was wrong?
> Nope.

Yep.

It was still correct (except for some minor technical errors
> having to do with how "r" should be calculated in haplo-diploid
> populations and whether Wright's coefficient suffices as a
> regression coefficient).

Nonsense. You haven't even broached the
subject of why we should employ IBD to calculate
relatedness.

> It just wasn't the only, and perhaps
> not even the best, way of looking at the issue.
>
> If you are going to make claims regarding what Hamilton's intentions
> were, and what he was or was not cognizant of, you really ought
> to read NROGL. But, then, if you read that with comprehension,
> then you wouldn't be wasting our time here, and you would lose
> what seems to be your main source of amusement.

You need to keep your nose to the grindstone,
boy, and don't go off on flights of fancy.
I have no problem at all conceding that you
understand Hamilton's intentions better than
I do. It hardly matters. You have two gigantic
obstacles standing between yourself and success.
You still haven't provided a rationale for
employing IBD to determine relatedness. (You
will never get beyond this obstacle. Employing
IBD to determing relatedness is pure nonsense.
There is no solution to this problem.)

Also, you still haven't described how we
calculate C (cost for the altruist) and B
(benefit for the reciepient of the altruistic
activity). Allow me to help you on this. We
will not (should not) have any dispute about
what units are employed. Obviously the units
involve units of fitness and obviously these
are difficult or impossible to actually
calculate. So I'm quite happy to leave the
actual units of fitness as theoretical. This
should save us a lot of unnecessary argument.
But here's the problem. Hamilton assumed that
individual organisms had discrete fitness
measurements. IOW, Hamilton was completely
blind to the possibility that any two organism
might have overlapping fitnesses.

What do you think?

Jim

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Nando Explains Natural Selection to You!
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  • Re: Hamiltons rule in small population
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    (sci.bio.evolution)
  • Re: increase in information represented by DNA
    ... information inasmuch as one set of variables intrinsic to the organism ... single number representing the file size, but only if the compression ... contains some random data, which all genomes do. ... because a feature is not under selection pressure at the moment does ...
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  • Re: what is life
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    (sci.bio.evolution)
  • Re: Hamiltons Nonsense
    ... > being other levels of selection than organism level. ... > selection Hamilton assumed that his rule provided the ... based on the Price equation. ... understood that the multi-level selection model ...
    (sci.bio.evolution)