The genetical evolution of social behaviour - II

I hope you have yesterday's post "out of your system." I will admit here that I don't know if I was particularly intelligible, but the prose and formalism of Hamilton's paper isn't exactly the picture of transparency. I find his later works much more intelligible; I suspect part of it has to do with the fact that Hamilton was responding and extending a tradition of evolutionary genetic modeling which reached back to R. A. Fisher and continued into the 40s and 50s. Reading a paper in 2008 which presupposes familiarity with a corpus of work from nearly three generations in the past can be a bit confusing; Hamilton's later papers, especially on the evolution of sex, were more "forward looking," and so the reference points allow a more secure mooring in familiar landscapes. I elided over some technical details and artificialities in Hamilton's mathematical treatment; but truly very little of ...