"Name And Address Supplied"
>
> Okay, but you've gone from making statements about
> populations to making statements about families.
>
Which in a sense is the point. Altruism within the population is not stable,
whilst altruism within the family is. Hence Hamilton's "r" refers
to alleles
identical by descent.
>
> But, anyway, Hamilton's rule is only concerned with situations
> where there is variation, regardless of what you think relatedness
> is.
>
Where you have a sexual population and substantial genetic variation then
the relatedness of distant relatives is so low that it can be ignored,
because r decays as a power of two. When you have an asexual population this
isn't the case, because a mother is gentically identical to her daughter,
and siblings are also genetically identical. However this is just an extreme
which tests the rule.
>
> I'm not sure what your point is.
>
"Green beard effect" genes break Hamilton's rule because the gene is no
longer acting co-operatively with other genes in the organism.
"Green beard" genes aren't biologically very plausible, however a gene for
"be altruistic to your own offspring" is plausible, and has many
of the same
advantages of the green beard gene (over a gene for "be altruistic to all
your fellow Amozon mollies", in an asexual species)
>
> If you are genuinely interested, I think it would save a lot of time
> if you went to the primary literature, rather than trying to muddle
> together an understanding from the threads in this newsgroup.
>
I'm not an expert on Hamilton's rule, and I can't quite understand some of
the points being made.
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