Kin selection under blending inheritance

Kin selection under blending inheritance.

Why did Darwin fail to develop his insights on kin selection into a proper theory of social adaptation? One suggestion has been that his inadequate understanding of heredity kept the problem out of focus. Here, I determine whether it is possible to develop a quantitative theory of kin selection upon the assumption of blending inheritance. I find that, whilst Hamilton's rule of kin selection can...

Rate of Adaptive Evolution under Blending Inheritance

In a population of size N , adaptive evolution is 2N times faster under Mendelian inheritance than under the 19th-century theory of blending inheritance. Unfortunately we have no means of determining, according to the standard of years, how long a period it takes to modify a species. Charles Darwin [2, p. 270] In the latter half of the 19th century, evolutionary time seemed limited. Victorian s...

Evolutionary Stability for Interactions among Kin under Quantitative Inheritance.

The theory of evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS) predicts the long-term evolutionary outcome of frequency-dependent selection by making a number of simplifying assumptions about the genetic basis of inheritance. I use a symmetrized multilocus model of quantitative inheritance without mutation to analyze the results of interactions between pairs of related individuals and compare the equilib...

Kin Selection

Kin selection

How can individuals calculate relatedness? They generally don’t need to, any more than a bird needs to calculate aerodynamic forces to fly. If, under certain conditions, performing a behavior satisfies Hamilton’s rule, then the action is favored. The triggering conditions may include cues to relatedness, which are usually based on social experience. A bee, for example, learns the smell of her b...