jamenegay{at}ra.rockwell.com (Jim Menegay) wrote in
news:brj3n0$2718$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 

> Guy Hoelzer responds, in part:
>> The solution to these theoretical problems that settles my
>> mind, and might help you sleep better, is to make the reasonable
>> assumption that individuals have a limited capacity to know their
>> relatives.  This means that individuals must falsely recognize a
>> class of individuals they consider to be unrelated, which I think
>> would include the vast majority of individuals in most populations.
>> Therefore, under this assumption each individual has a small number
>> (definitely a finite number) of relatives among whom they might want
>> to distribute their altruism. 
> 
> Mr. Hoelzer,
> 
> While I appreciate your attempt to help, I'm afraid I must ask you to
> buy your own lunch.  You have addressed neither of the two issues I
> raise explicitly:
> 1.  The potential for the number of copies of my genome to be greater
> than the population.
> 
> [moderator's hint to the bloody obvious: Inbreeding. Duh. - JAH]
> 
> 2.  The backward-conservation / forward-proliferation phenomenon that
> my wife calls "the Anthropic Principle".
> 
> You do address the problem I raise implicitly in my title, and while
> you solve my problem, you do not solve Hamilton's.  He applies his
> theory to cases in which he assumes absolutely no ability to recognize
> relatives and in which a non-zero "r" is achieved simply by
> inbreeding.  My implicit challenge to Hamilton is that it is not clear
> why "r" is not always large. 
> 
> But thanks for trying.

 
Listen to your moderator, for he is wise and can delete your follows. The 
explanation is that as you expand your list of relatives you quickly run 
into duplicates - some of your second cousins once removed on your 
mother's side are also third cousins once removed on your father's side. 
The same holds true going back in time - for example, Calvin Coolidge and 
his wife were eighth cousins twice removed, FDR's parents were thirteenth 
cousins - and in fact if you go back far enough (about 800 years) your 
ancestral pool will no longer expand.

Yours,

Bill Morse
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