ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
The general form of Hamilton's rule makes no predictions and cannot be tested empirically.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- The general version of Hamilton's rule.eLife · 2025Article
- Embracing the complexity of cooperation.eLife · 2025Article
- Nonlinear social evolution and the emergence of collective action.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Article
- 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
- Ten recent insights for our understanding of cooperation.Nature ecology & evolution · 2021Review
- The Price equation and the unity of social evolution theory.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- The problem with the Price equation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- The group selection-inclusive fitness equivalence claim: not true and not relevant.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Cultural group selection and human cooperation: a conceptual and empirical review.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Review
- Reproductive skew in cooperative breeding: Environmental variability, antagonistic selection, choice, and control.Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- Inclusive fitness is an indispensable approximation for understanding organismal design.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2019Article
- Hamilton's rule is essential but insufficient for understanding monogamy's role in social evolution.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- Can Hamilton's rule be violated?eLife · 2018Article
- The benefits of grouping as a main driver of social evolution in a halictine bee.Science advances · 2018Article
- Hamilton's inclusive fitness maintains heritable altruism polymorphism throughProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- The inclusive fitness controversy: finding a way forward.Royal Society open science · 2017Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
Hamilton's rule asserts that a trait is favored by natural selection if the benefit to others, [Formula: see text], multiplied by relatedness, [Formula: see text], exceeds the cost to self, [Formula: see text] Specifically, Hamilton's rule states that the change in average trait value in a population is proportional to [Formula: see text] This rule is commonly believed to be a natural law making important predictions in biology, and its influence has spread from evolutionary biology to other fields including the social sciences. Whereas many feel that Hamilton's rule provides valuable intuition, there is disagreement even among experts as to how the quantities [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], and [Formula: see text] should be defined for a given system. Here, we investigate a widely endorsed formulation of Hamilton's rule, which is said to be as general as natural selection itself. We show that, in this formulation, Hamilton's rule does not make predictions and cannot be tested empirically. It turns out that the parameters [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] depend on the change in average trait value and therefore cannot predict that change. In this formulation, which has been called "exact and general" by its proponents, Hamilton's rule can "predict" only the data that have already been given.
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