ArticleRoyal Society open science2017
The inclusive fitness controversy: finding a way forward.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Early-season helping yields increasing returns to scale at the onset of eusociality.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Nonlinear social evolution and the emergence of collective action.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- How to make an inclusive-fitness model.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Lifetime inclusive fitness effects of cooperative polygamy in the acorn woodpecker.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
- Molecular patterns and processes in evolving sociality: lessons from insects.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Changes in white oak (Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Extending the range of additivity in using inclusive fitness.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- The Price equation and the unity of social evolution theory.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Disentangling strictly self-serving mutations from win-win mutations in a mutualistic microbial community.eLife · 2019Article
- Evaluating inclusive fitness.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- Inclusive fitness is an indispensable approximation for understanding organismal design.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2019Article
- The benefits of grouping as a main driver of social evolution in a halictine bee.Science advances · 2018Article
- Altruism in a volatile world.Nature · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
This paper attempts to reconcile critics and defenders of inclusive fitness by constructing a synthesis that does justice to the insights of both. I argue that criticisms of the regression-based version of Hamilton's rule, although they undermine its use for predictive purposes, do not undermine its use as an organizing framework for social evolution research. I argue that the assumptions underlying the concept of inclusive fitness, conceived as a causal property of an individual organism, are unlikely to be exactly true in real populations, but they are approximately true given a specific type of weak selection that Hamilton took, on independent grounds, to be responsible for the cumulative assembly of complex adaptation. Finally, I reflect on the uses and limitations of 'design thinking' in social evolution research.
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Registered trials
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.