"John Edser"  wrote in message
news:...
> "Name And Address Supplied"
 wrote
> 
> > > JE:-
> > > genes for sterility. Sterility genes cannot be selected
> > > within the body of the sterile form, only within
> > > the body of a non sterile form. Hamilton made
> > > this error.
>  
> > NAS
> > Unless we are discussing meiotic drive or similar, the sterility genes
> > are selected within a population, not within an individual.
> 
> JE:-
> Incorrect.
> You are misusing the popular gene centric
> over simplified model that just assumes additive
> fitness per gene, per individual, per
> population. 

How so?  Different genes are allowed to have different fitnesses in
different genetic backgrounds.  Just because the success of the gene
in a generation is the arithmetic mean success of all the individual
instances of that gene in that generation does not mean that all
instances of the gene must have this mean success.

> Sterile genes do_evolve_ within populations
> of fertile individuals (one Darwinian population) but
> are not selected via such populations. Sterile genes can
> only be selected via a fertile individual that carries
> them, which strictly, has an additive Darwinian fitness
> to all other fertile forms within one evolving population.

Let an allele reduce a fertile individual's contribution to the next
generation from A to A-s, where A is some baseline fitness.  As s
tends to, but does not quite reach A, you are happy to let the allele
to be selected [against] in the population.  When s reaches A, you are
suggesting that something utterly new arises, so that we need a brand
new way of thinking about how selection acts on the allele.  Why can't
we merely regard the completely sterile form as the extreme in a
continuum of impaired fertility, rather than assign it to a
qualitatively new class of its own?
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