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On Hamilton’s Rule and Inclusive Fitness Theory with Nonadditive Payoffs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Abstract

Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness is a widely used framework for studying the evolution of social behavior, but controversy surrounds its status. Hamilton originally derived his famous rb > c rule for the spread of a social gene by assuming additivity of costs and benefits. However, it has recently been argued that the additivity assumption can be dispensed with, so long as the −c and b terms are suitably defined, as partial regression coefficients. I argue that this way of generalizing Hamilton’s rule to the nonadditive case, while formally correct, faces conceptual problems.

Type
50 Years of Inclusive Fitness
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

Thanks to Johannes Martens, Jonathan Birch, Andy Gardner, James Marshall, and Alan Grafen for comments and discussion. This work was supported by the European Research Council Seventh Framework Program (FP7/20072013), ERC grant agreement 295449.

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