After reading Nature's Oracle (yes, a lengthy review will be up soonish) I am even more struck by how evolutionary process suffused W. D. Hamilton's whole worldview. This resulted in some peculiar conflicts over his career with those who wished to partition evolutionary and biological processes away from the domain of humans. Of course Hamilton himself focused for most of his scientific life on non-human phenomena in the specific details (e.g., the utilization of hymenoptera to illustrate inclusive fitness),
but he always believed that his evolutionary insights were general.
This makes sense in light of his idolization of R. A. Fisher, for whom evolutionary genetics was a practical science (he was a eugenicist). One of the biographical details which receives great attention in Nature's Oracle is Hamilton's untimely approach of an anthropology department the early 1960s in the interest of pursuing graduate work on the evolution of social behavior. It ...
