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E.O. Wilson’s Controversial Rethink of Altruism
I have decided to focus my “homework” leading up to the 2012 World Science Festival in New York City on two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist E.O. Wilson and his recent rethinking of a long-held tenet of evolutionary biology known as inclusive fitness. The theory of inclusive fitness provides a logical mathematical framework for rationalizing kin-selection, a way to explain why some organisms sacrifice themselves to benefit their kin. While such behavior may appear to be for the greater good of a species, evolutionary biologists have traditionally pegged it to selfish motives: the built-in drive to pass on genes from one replicating machine to the next can handily explain all traits, including perceived altruism. This view is still widely accepted by many prominent scientists—Alan Grafen, Robert Trivers, and Steven Pinker to name a few. Classical genetic fitness is measured by the number of offspring an organism can produce and support. Inclusive fitness adds on to this idea by allowing the survival of blood relatives to contribute to overall fitness. An organism’s inclusive fitness includes “offspring equivalents” or relatives that share the same percentage of genes as direct offspring; a sister is as valuable as two half brothers are as valuable as four …
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