In article ,
Jim McGinn  wrote:
>Anon.  wrote 
>
>JMc:
>> > Hamilton's arguments don't work.  They just appear 
>> > to work because those that think they do work are 
>> > using Hamilton's arguments themselves to verify its 
>> > conceptual accuracy.

>Bob:
>> If you mean me, I'm not sure I ever said this.  I've 
>> said that relatedness is defined as the probability 
>> of two individuals sharing an allele IBD, and my claim 
>> that this is useful (valid?) springs from the fact 
>> that this concept comes out of Hamilton's maths as 
>> being useful.
>
>JMc:
>You just made my point for me, Bob. You just declared 
>that it is useful (valid?) because it comes out of 
>Hamilton's maths.
....
>JMc:
>In desperation 
>Hamilton latched onto genes IBD because this was the 
>only thing that made his model *seem* to work.  


This is the same old objection from McGinn.  We go
through the same process every time.  We come up with a
simple model, in which it can be shown that Hamilton's
relatedness measure is the one to use to derive the
condition under which a rare allele predisposing to an
altruistic behavior will be expected to increase in
frequency.

McGinn then says the model is not valid.  After a bit
of discussion it comes out that he thinks that all
models in evolutionary genetics are not valid.

McGinn's objection is not specifically to anything
Hamilton did.  It is to all results derived from models
in theoretical population genetics, all of them, including
Hardy-Weinberg proportions.  So why don't we discuss
Hard-Weinberg proportions?  It would be easier for people
to understand.  They would intuit the results better, and
would quickly see how vacuous McGinn's argument is.

I repeat, McGinn's objection to Hamilton's result is simply
an objection to all models in theoretical population
genetics, not an objection to something particular to
Hamilton's work.

-- 
Joe Felsenstein         joe{at}removethispart.gs.washington.edu
 Department of Genome Sciences and Department of Biology,
 University of Washington, Box 357730, Seattle, WA 98195-7730 USA
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