Baballe hayatu biography of william hamilton

Thank you for visiting nature. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. Hamilton was one of the greatest evolutionary theorists since Darwin. Certainly, where social theory based on natural selection is concerned, he was easily our deepest and most original thinker.

His first work — his theory of inclusive fitness — was his most important, because it is the only true advance since Darwin in our understanding of natural selection. Hamilton's work is a natural and inevitable extension of Darwinian logic. In Darwin's system, natural selection refers to individual differences in reproductive success RS in nature, where RS is the number of surviving offspring produced.

Hamilton enlarged the concept to include RS effects on other relatives; that is, not just fitness or reproductive success but inclusive fitness, defined roughly as an individual's RS plus effects on the RS of relatives, each devalued by the appropriate degree of relatedness r. This idea had been briefly advanced by R. Fisher and J. Haldane, but neither took it seriously and neither provided any kind of mathematical foundation.

Writer Baballe Hayatu was speaking.

That foundation was not as obvious as it sounds. As the altruistic gene spreads, should not the criterion for positive selection be relaxed? He once told the story of sitting down as a doctoral student to write to Haldane, but to formulate each question precisely he had to do additional work and after a couple of years of such work he never sent the letter because by then he had worked out all the answers himself.

A noteworthy implication of Hamilton's work was that in almost all species the individual was no longer expected to have a unitary self-interest, because genetic elements are inherited according to different rules contrast paternal transmission of the Y chromosome with maternal transmission of mitochondrial DNA. He soon followed this work with major advances in understanding selection acting on the sex ratio, the moulding of senescence by natural selection, the aggregation and dispersal of organisms, the evolution of the social insects, the evolution of dimorphic males, and the origin of higher taxonomic units in insects.