Re: Hamilton's rule in small population
- From: "John Edser" <edser@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 01:02:55 -0400 (EDT)
Catherine Woodgold wrote:-
> >> JE:-
> >> Hamilton's Rule is group selective. To reduce it to organism selective
> you
> >> must divide rb/p where p is the number of recipients. Whenever you do
> so
> >> the
> >> rule fails.
> I wonder whether you mean situations like the following:
> A strong wolf has some food. It altruistically gives
> some of the food to a weaker wolf, perhaps a cub,
> perhaps its own cub or a close relative such as
> a niece or nephew. Some other wolves standing
> around, who are not particularly related to those
> two, were not able to get any of the food as long
> as the strong wolf held it, but as soon as the weak
> wolf gets the food, they grab it and it gets divided
> up among many wolves.
>
> Is that what you mean?
JE:-
In HR the recipients are equally related r to the actor.
In this situation the wolf donates x resources to p equally related cubs so
that each cub grows up and increases it's own mean Darwinian fitness by b/p
which reduces to a mean gene centric gain per individual of just rb/p
causing the rule to fail. When rb remains group selective each individual
does not need to care what happens regarding its own total fitness. It only
needs to care about the b per group. So if the donated food is gobbled up by
just one large cub who then proceeds to eat all the other cubs as well
providing a larger b for the recipients as one whole compared to the
situation in which each recipients lived, reproduced but provided a smaller
group b, then all to the good re: a group selective rb. Quite obviously this
is not the case if selection operates between active and not just passive
recipients. Hamilton's recipients have to be passive just to prohibit
Darwinian selection operating between them.
Gene centricity is defined within HR as genes replicated over _organism_
generations and NOT gene generations so that reducing rb from being group
centric to organism centric remains an essential and necessary first stage
in reducing rb to a valid heuristic gene centricity. Gene centric Neo
Darwinists just skip this critical step. They go from classically organism
centric to heuristic gene centric by the magic of mathematics which just
crashes through the _necessary_ selective barriers set up within
evolutionary theory like a bull in a china shop.
> That situation is not what I mean when I talk about
> altruistic acts with b and c.
JE:-
Ok.
> When I talk about
> the direct effects of the act, I mean to include
> things like benefit to other wolves standing around
> like that. I said there was no direct benefit
> to others; that was meant to exclude situations
> such as the above. Maybe I need a word in between
> "direct" and "indirect".
JE:-
What you are looking for is something that exists between DEPENDENT and
INDEPENDENT selectees within empirically based evolutionary theory. They do
not exist, i.e. they can only exist as a CONTRADITION.
> The only indirect
> effect I want to allow in the scenario is that
> because certain individuals survive, they take up
> habitat space and resources and this causes others
> to have to die off to make space.
JE:-
Darwinian evolution by natural selection acting on random heritable
variation is not just a zero sum game. It requires a maximand proposition.
Are you aware of what this is?
Regards,
John Edser
.
- Prev by Date: Re: Hamilton's rule
- Next by Date: Re: Hamilton's Rule: light at the end of a LONG tunnel?
- Previous by thread: Re: Hamilton's rule in small population
- Next by thread: Re: Hamilton's rule in small population
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
|
