Tim Tyler wrote:
> Jim McGinn  wrote or quoted:
> 

>>>That doesn't mean that Jim and John are wrong - that is 
>>>for the reader to decide - but it does mean that they have had plenty of 
>>>opportunity for making their views known.  So blaming the continued 
>>>acceptance of Hamilton's rule on some fault in the peer-review
process is 
>>>clearly a red herring. Hamilton's rule is accepted because the majority 
>>>of scientists who have taken a hard look at it think it has some 
>>>validity.
>>
>>Some validity?  What does this supposedly mean?  
>>Either it is valid or it is invalid.  Sounds like 
>>nothing more than an excuse for vagueness.
> 
> 
> It could be a reference to the fact that Hamilton's rule
> assumes that the relatedness of the actors is known to
> the participants - whereas in nature, that condition
> is rarely met exactly - and usually there is some measure
> of uncertainty which causes a mismatich between relatedness
> and percieved relatedness.
> 
Actually, Hamilton's rule doesn't need the actors to know their 
relatedness, only that the altruistic behaviour is more likely to help 
an individual who has a higher relatedness (and then of course that the 
inequality holds).

To be exact, it only needs a correlation between relatedness, and 
probability of receiving the altruistic action (or, to be exactly exact, 
the expected benefit).  This is perhaps clearer from Price's 
re-expression of Hamilton's rule.

> Green beards and linkage provide more wrinkles on Hamilton's rule.
> 
David Copperfield will be in Helsinki in a couple of weeks.  There's a 
huge banner on the Hartwell Areena advertising this.  On it he has a 
distinctly green beard/stubble.

Either he's signalling to other green-bearded performers, or he's oxidising.

Bob

-- 
Bob O'Hara
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
P.O. Box 68 (Gustaf Hällströmin katu 2b)
FIN-00014 University of Helsinki
Finland

Telephone: +358-9-191 51479
Mobile: +358 50 599 0540
Fax:  +358-9-191 51400
WWW:  http://www.RNI.Helsinki.FI/~boh/
Journal of Negative Results - EEB: www.jnr-eeb.org
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