ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2020
The problem with the Price equation.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Beyond formal equivalence: research questions and explanatory function in group and multilevel selection theory.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2026Pooled it
- Foundations of Ecological and Evolutionary Change.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- The general version of Hamilton's rule.eLife · 2025Article
- Survival cost sharing among altruistic full siblings in Mendelian population.BMC ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Reducing global inequality increases local cooperation: a simple model of group selection with a global externality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Natural Selection beyond Life? A Workshop Report.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- The cancellation effect at the group level.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2020Article
- Fifty years of 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
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In this paper, I will argue that the generality of the Price equation comes at a cost, and that is that the terms in it become meaningless. There are simple linear models that can be written in a Price equation-like form, and for those the terms in them have a meaningful interpretation. There are also models for which that is not the case, and in general, when no assumptions on the shape of the fitness function are made, and all possible models are allowed for, the regression coefficients in the Price equation do not allow for a meaningful interpretation. The failure to recognize that the Price equation, although general, only has a meaningful interpretation under restrictive assumptions, has done real damage to the field of social evolution, as will be illustrated by looking at an application of the Price equation to group selection. This article is part of the theme issue 'Fifty years of the Price equation'.
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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.