Sunday, October 22, 2006

Dawkins on inclusive fitness

So we discussed the mother guarding paper (posted below) this week at our journal club, and Alan Rogers (a geneticist here) pointed out that the authors did not model inclusive fitness correctly. No one but him caught this, of course, but we'd all fallen for a common misconception about inclusive fitness. He passed around this brief excerpt from the Extended Phenotype where Dawkins addresses this. I thought I'd include it here, so we can all be certain of our definitions of this prettttty pretttty prettty important concept. (imagine that last bit in my best Larry David voice.)

Check it out, it's worth a read: (click to enlarge)



3 comments:

Judy Easton said...

funny funny! back when David made us write our conceptual foundations of ep paper, apparently we all got the definition of inclusive fitness wrong also (well those of us who included inclusive fitness as a foundation) and he referred us back to the Extended Phenotype also. In a sad way; I'm glad to see it isn't just EP grad students getting the definition wrong...

Emily said...

Exactly! A paper made it into Proceedings with the wrong assumptions about it...Crazy. :) As for the mother guarding paper, it didn't end up changing the predictions qualitatively too much. So who knows, it could really be going on out there... ;)

Aaron Goetz said...

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I would have been one of the ones that got the definition of inclusive fitness wrong.