Pitchford’s List Sees Revised “Removing Lewontin’s Fallacy from Hamilton’s Rule”
My proposal, first posted here, for how to remove Lewontin’s Fallacy from Hamilton’s presentation of Price’s equations of group evolution, has been posted to Ian Pitchford’s Evolutionary Psychology Yahoo group. This is significant because men like J. Phillipe Rushton, of Genetic Similarity Theory fame, and Henry Harpending of Ethnic Genetic Interests fame, are recent participants there.
The proposal is still highly schematic making it vulnerable attack, both fair and unfair, by sophisticates but after getting valuable feedback here at MR I was able to shore it up a bit before sending it to to Ian Pitchford for approval for his group. Nevertheless there is much work to be done figuring out how to correct some of the technical terminology and probably correct some of the concepts used so they mesh properly with currently used bioinformatic tools (such as ”STRUCTURE”) and behavioral ecology theory. The main contributions from MR so far have been John S. Bolton bringing to my attention the significance of haplotype blocks (which is timely given the recent news concerning the International Haplomap Project) and J Richards bringing to my attention the controversy surrounding the proper application of Price’s equations and providing the paper by Matthijs van Veelen ”On the use of the Price equation”. I also appreciate his heads-up about the politically correct terminology “behavioral ecology” to use rather than “sociobiology” although I couldn’t resist leaving embedded one reference to “sociobiology”. (It really angers me that the Harvard cabal of Lewontin and Gould was able to gut a perfectly legitimate word like “sociobiology” of its utility.)
I know I’m over my head here and there is so much work to be done that I may not ultimately get much credit for this reformulation which I have so schematically and somewhat amateurishly thrown together—but the important thing is that the theory of behavioral ecology be bioinformatically revised.
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Good job James. Ian has restricted membership to his group as well as viewing to only members. Luckily, I became a member a couple of years ago out of interest. It will be interesting to see responses to your post.
James,
I have provided the entire paper by van Veelen here. Just in case you did not know, the hash associated with each comment provides the url that links to the comment, i.e., if you paste the url associated with the hash, you can pinpoint to the exact comment that you wish to direct your readers to.
Posted by J Richards on Sunday, November 27, 2005 at 07:36 AM | #
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