Tim Tyler  wrote in message
news:...



> Both of these suggest that r is not the probability of sharing alleles 
> - but is rather a more abstract figure calculated from the direct family 
> relatedness of the organisms in question.  



> As Hamilton suggests in the first quote, the distinction between the
> two things isn't /normally/ terribly significant.
> 
> Normally most members of the population are not close relatives - and 
> there's no powerful selective force making non-relatves evolve identical 
> genes as one another[*], and segregation distorters normally have a low
> frequency in the population - and often only affect one chromosome.
> 
> [*] I.e. in practice, identical genes means that the genes are identical 
>     by descent - them being identical by chance or selection would both be
>     fantastically unlikely occurrences.


Can I jump in and say that, if I have understand what you mean by
"identical by chance", then I would definitely not agree with the
above statement for all cases in which the allele in question is not
vanishingly rare in the population.
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