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Hamilton’s rule and its discontents

Birch, Jonathan ORCID: 0000-0001-7517-4759 (2014) Hamilton’s rule and its discontents. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 65 (2). 381 - 411. ISSN 0007-0882

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Identification Number: 10.1093/bjps/axt016

Abstract

In an incendiary 2010 Nature article, M. A. Nowak, C. E. Tarnita and E. O. Wilson present a savage critique of the best known and most widely used framework for the study of social evolution, W. D. Hamilton’s theory of kin selection. Over a hundred biologists have since rallied to the theory’s defence, but Nowak et al. maintain that their arguments ‘stand unrefuted’. Here I consider the most contentious claim Nowak et al. defend: that Hamilton’s rule, the core explanatory principle of kin selection theory, ‘almost never holds’. I first distinguish two versions of Hamilton’s rule in contemporary theory: a special version (HRS) that requires restrictive assumptions, and a general version (HRG) that does not. I then show that Nowak et al. are most charitably construed as arguing that HRS almost never holds, while HRG buys its generality at the expense of explanatory power. While their arguments against HRS are fairly uncontroversial, their arguments against HRG are more contentious, yet these have been largely overlooked in the ensuing furore. I consider the arguments for and against the explanatory value of HRG, with a view to assessing what exactly is at stake in the debate. I suggest that the debate hinges on issues concerning the causal interpretability of regression coefficients, and concerning the explanatory function Hamilton’s rule is intended to serve.

Item Type: Article
Official URL: http://bjps.oxfordjournals.org
Additional Information: © 2013 The Author
Divisions: Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
Subjects: B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General)
Date Deposited: 11 May 2015 09:26
Last Modified: 25 Feb 2024 22:15
URI: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/61877

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