Formalizing Darwinism and inclusive fitness theory

Formalizing Darwinism and inclusive fitness theory.

Inclusive fitness maximization is a basic building block for biological contributions to any theory of the evolution of society. There is a view in mathematical population genetics that nothing is caused to be maximized in the process of natural selection, but this is explained as arising from a misunderstanding about the meaning of fitness maximization. Current theoretical work on inclusive fi...

Theory of Inclusive Fitness

Inclusive fitness theory from Darwin to Hamilton.

ONE of the central dogmas of modern behavioral ecology is that blood kinship plays a critical role in understanding the evolution of social behavior, particularly of costly social behavior such as altruism and cooperation. But it was not always so, and what I would like to do in this Perspectives is provide some historical context that led up to William Hamilton’s seminal work developing inclus...

Fitness, inclusive fitness, and optimization

Individual-as-maximizing agent analogies result in a simple understanding of the functioning of the biological world. Identifying the conditions under which individuals can be regarded as fitness maximizing agents is thus of considerable interest to biologists. Here, we compare different concepts of fitness maximization, and discuss within a single framework the relationship between Hamilton’s ...

Adaptation and Inclusive Fitness

Inclusive fitness theory captures how individuals can influence the transmission of their genes to future generations by influencing either their own reproductive success or that of related individuals. This framework is frequently used for studying the way in which natural selection leads to organisms being adapted to their environments. A number of recent papers have criticised this approach,...