"Malcolm"  wrote in message
news:...



> The technical term used is "identical by descent", which
maybe doesn't help
> much.
> 
> Imagine we have a new mutation which has been going for only five or six
> generations and is thus still very rare. The chance of this new mutation
> being in a relative is obviously given by the 1/2, 1/8 metric and not the
> 99% one.
> 
> The point is that every new allele starts off as just such a rare mutation,
> so we use the more restricted definition of "related" when calculating
> whether altruism is adaptive.

I don't see your point. The implication seems to be that the
relatedness appropriate to Hamilton's rule will increase as the allele
becomes more frequent. That's clearly not the case. Hamilton's rule
makes no assumption about allele frequencies, except for pq>0.

Also, as has been discussed extensively in sbe, relatedness in
Hamilton's rule is not a probability of identity by descent measure.
Hamilton's 'green beard' example makes this quite clear.
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