PSYC 3420 Lecture Notes - Menopause, Cortisol, Kin Recognition
11 Mar 2013
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Hamilton"s rule: is that natural selection favours mechanisms for altruism when c < rb. The key is that hamilton"s rule defines the conditions under which adaptations for aid to kin can evolve. It c is the cost to the actor r is the degree of genetic relatedness between the actor and the recipient is the benefit to the recipient defines the selection pressure to which genes for altruism. Only those genes that code for traits that fulfill hamilton"s rule can spread throughout the population and hence evolve to become part of the species typical repertoire. This is sometimes called evolvability constraint because only genes that meet the conditions of hamilton"s rule can evolve. The theory of inclusive fitness renders parenting as a special case of kinship, albeit an extremely important special case, because parenting represents just one way of investing in vehicles that contain copies of one"s genes.
