Friday, January 26, 2007
Hamilton and Altruism
In my evolutionary psychology seminar, I just got the chance to read one of W.D. Hamilton's papers. This is the first time that I have actually read him directly. Of course, he is a staple in evolution and ecology courses with his theory of inclusive fitness as a means to explain "altruistic" behavior. I have always found his exploration of natural selection at the level of the gene and its effect on social behavior quite fascinating. The great thing about reading him was his very straightforward writing style. Imagine such complex ideas with mathematical models and all being lucid! The man is a good writer. Anywho, I know that a lot of mathematical manipulations have been done to test his theory of altruism with current ecological data and that it holds up pretty well. Anyone have an idea of what these statistics look like? How exactly would you assign a numerical value to the cost to the altruist or the benefit to the recipient? These, unlike a coefficient of relatedness, very hard to quantify. It would be really interesting to examine an ecological study that tests Hamilton's theories. Anybody know of a good one?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Wikipedia has an entry on Hamilton, altruism, and kin selection that shows some of the stats used in determining when altruism is beneficial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection
I know I've read some good papers on altruism, but I can't seem to find them right now. But if you search on "hamilton AND altruism" in Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=hamilton+AND+altruism&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search)
a paper by the man himself on altruism in social insects from 1972 is the first listed. I haven't read it myself, but GS shows 297 citations, so it's obviously a well-respected paper - and you could track down those forward citations to find other studies.
Good luck! Your project sounds interesting.
those are good questions. if you could record, for instance, that an individual issuing a warning call gets captured and eaten, that'd be a pretty clear-cut case of a significant cost incurred ... but i doubt you could assemble a very big data set of such observations.
unfortunately, i can't offer you any direct citations either. but your professor for evolutionary psychology might.
in addition to what nicole said about google scholar (great resource, by the way), at tulane we're also lucy enough to have access to the 'web of science' (which is the online version of the 'science citation index', if anyone remembers that). i'd be happy to show you how it works, as would, i expect, someone at the library.
*embarrassed*
that should, of course, read 'lucky' and not 'lucy'.
Post a Comment