Re: Most important paper in evolutionary biology

Wirt Atmar wrote:
> Joe writes:
>
>
>>Nevertheless, Hamilton's paper's impact has been broader, and his paper even
>>more startling [leaving aside the couple of posters here who repeatedly try to
>>persuade people that Hamilton's work was wrong -- they have not persuaded the
>>rest of us here, or biologists outside, of that].
>
>
> And that might be described as the perfect definition of dogma :-).
>
> All kidding aside, I have yet to see any physical, experimental evidence
> that supports Hamilton's hypothesis. I have however seen a great deal
> that argues strongly against it and I have repeated much of it here in
> prior posts.
>
> But there is one argument that I haven't made here before, but one I
> consider crucial. Hamilton's thesis argues for those genetical
> conditions in which altruism would prosper and thus promote the
> origination of sociality.
>
> However (and it is my prejudice) that I don't see the evolution of
> complex, task-partitioned coloniality at the level of individuals to be
> fundamentally any different than the evolution of complex,
> task-partitioned coloniality at the level of cells. They are repeated
> patterns, hierarchically organized. If that statement is true, then
> whatever explanation is to be proffered for one phenomenon must also
> adequately explain the other, and Hamilton's argument does nothing to
> explain the evolution of complex multicellularity.
>
I think it does: the relatedness between cells in a body is almost 1, so
it's more likely that a complex multicellular organism would be formed
from a single genotype.

Bob

--
Bob O'Hara
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
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FIN-00014 University of Helsinki
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