rB>C @50 - The Golden Anniversary of Hamilton’s Rule (or helping your relatives is good for you)
hosted by the NHM in collaboration with UCL, the CEE and Imperial College London
The nocturnal social wasp Apoica pallens – Darién, Panama (photo Sandy Knapp)
Wednesday, 12 February 2014, 4:00 pm
Flett Lecture Theatre, The Natural History Museum
(reception follows)
Our topic this year celebrates the 50th anniversary of the original 1964 paper in which W.D. (Bill) Hamilton first articulated what is known as Hamilton’s Rule (i.e. that helping your relatives makes evolutionary sense, even if it doesn’t benefit you directly )
Laurent Lehmann (Université de Lausanne, Switzerland) - Hamilton’s 1964 legacy: the rule that rules them all and the myth of inclusive fitness maximization
This talk will present the key steps to derive the rb-c>0 rule and discuss the two results obtained by Hamilton in his 1964 paper: (1) an equation describing allele frequency change under natural selection expressed in terms of phenotypic cost and benefit and a genealogical concept of relatedness; and (2) a result about the maximization of inclusive fitness. The first result has been extended to all conditions and provides the rule that rules them all. The second result applies only under narrow conditions and points to a mismatch between Hamilton's aim for inclusive fitness and what has been proved over the last 50 years.
David Haig (Harvard University, USA) - All-inclusive fitness: the enduring legacy of W. D. Hamilton
W. D. Hamilton’s concept of inclusive fitness revolutionized the way we think about social interactions. Individuals were shown to have an interest in each other’s well-being to the extent that they shared common genes. His insights have had unexpected medical applications to understanding conflicts within genomes between genes inherited from fathers and genes inherited from mothers and to understanding how sibling rivalry can be expressed in the mother’s womb during the early stages of pregnancy.
Full information including a flyer and map for this event can be found at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/cee/events/darwin-birthday
For additional details on attending this or other seminars see http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/seminars-events/index.html
