Rochard powers3/30/2023 Still, I’d bet that most people who aren’t geneticists would assume that Hamilton’s “world of model organisms” is exactly that: an abstract template that real living things will ignore, challenge, or modify in countless creative and surprising ways. After all, many different branches of life have repeatedly converged on the strategy of parental commitment and sacrifice. The adaptive advantage of taking care of other organisms with whom we share a close genetic relationship makes intuitive sense. But Hamilton, one of the progenitors of the theory of kin selection, took the meme seriously enough to use it in developing what is now called Hamilton’s rule:Īccording to the rule, genes tend to increase in frequency when the degree of genetic relatedness between a giver and a receiver of an altruistic act, multiplied by the benefit to the receiver, is greater than the reproductive cost to the giver. Haldane, one of history’s most quotable scientists, although Haldane never wrote it down.) The arithmetical precision of Hamilton’s formula gives it an almost comical ring, and the line sounds at least a little tongue-in-cheek. Hamilton once wrote that “in the world of our model organisms … everyone would sacrifice when he can thereby save more than two brothers, or four half brothers or eight first cousins.” (A similar quip is often attributed to J. Reflecting on a possible genetic basis for altruism, the evolutionary biologist W. Richard Powers reaches beyond the cold calculus of kin selection to look at how human beings find kinship with nonhuman relatives and how stories can reveal our shared fate.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |