ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
There is no fitness but fitness, and the lineage is its bearer.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Why there are so many definitions of fitness in models.Genetics · 2026Review
- Inclusive fitness explains behavioral diversity in a social bird.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Evolutionarily stable strategy analysis and its links to demography and genetics through invasion fitness.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Article
- Is it good to be bad? An evolutionary analysis of the adaptive potential of psychopathic traits.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- Decline and fall: The causes of group failure in cooperatively breeding meerkats.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Intergroup aggression in meerkats.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Reproductive skew in cooperative breeding: Environmental variability, antagonistic selection, choice, and control.Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- The strategic reference gene: an organismal theory of inclusive fitness.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Inclusive fitness is an indispensable approximation for understanding organismal design.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2019Article
- Evaluating inclusive fitness.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- A mathematical formalism for natural selection with arbitrary spatial and genetic structure.Journal of mathematical biology · 2019Article
- Emergence of evolutionary driving forces in pattern-forming microbial populations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
- The inclusive fitness controversy: finding a way forward.Royal Society open science · 2017Article
- Population structure reduces benefits from partner choice in mutualistic symbiosis.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Variability in fitness effects can preclude selection of the fittest.Annual review of ecology, evolution, and systematics · 2017Article
- The evolution of cooperation based on direct fitness benefits.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Reproductive success is predicted by social dynamics and kinship in managed animal populations.F1000Research · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Inclusive fitness has been the cornerstone of social evolution theory for more than a half-century and has matured as a mathematical theory in the past 20 years. Yet surprisingly for a theory so central to an entire field, some of its connections to evolutionary theory more broadly remain contentious or underappreciated. In this paper, we aim to emphasize the connection between inclusive fitness and modern evolutionary theory through the following fact: inclusive fitness is simply classical Darwinian fitness, averaged over social, environmental and demographic states that members of a gene lineage experience. Therefore, inclusive fitness is neither a generalization of classical fitness, nor does it belong exclusively to the individual. Rather, the lineage perspective emphasizes that evolutionary success is determined by the effect of selection on all biological and environmental contexts that a lineage may experience. We argue that this understanding of inclusive fitness based on gene lineages provides the most illuminating and accurate picture and avoids pitfalls in interpretation and empirical applications of inclusive fitness theory.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.