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. More than 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. (shrink)

Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness is a widely used framework for studying the evolution of social behavior, but controversy surrounds its status. Hamilton originally derived his famous rb > c rule for the spread of a social gene by assuming additivity of costs and benefits. However, it has recently been argued that the additivity assumption can be dispensed with, so long as the −c and b terms are suitably defined, as partial regression coefficients. I argue that this way (...) of generalizing Hamilton’s rule to the nonadditive case, while formally correct, faces conceptual problems. (shrink)

Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness is a widely used framework for studying the evolution of social behavior, but controversy surrounds its status. Hamilton originally derived his famous rb > c rule for the spread of a social gene by assuming additivity of costs and benefits. However, it has recently been argued that the additivity assumption can be dispensed with, so long as the −c and b terms are suitably defined, as partial regression coefficients. I argue that this way (...) of generalizing Hamilton’s rule to the nonadditive case, while formally correct, faces conceptual problems. (shrink)

Some scholars have raised the potential functional role of fictive kinship for religion, generally. This paper seeks to develop that idea. It is argued in this paper that fictive kinship language in religion (and some other non-religious contexts) recruits traits connected to Hamilton’s rule as it is expressed inHomo sapienspsychology. The effect is that cooperation is augmented within a population that generally shares the same religious worldview. The general position is that if religions are in the business of (...) cooperation and this partially accounts for their evolution and preservation, then it follows that we should take particular note of any significant feature of religions that might lend itself to the cooperation account of religion’s apparent evolutionary success. Fictive kinship is one such feature. (shrink)

God vs. the Gavel challenges the pervasive assumption that all religious conduct deserves constitutional protection. While religious conduct provides many benefits to society, it is not always benign. The thesis of the book is that anyone who harms another person should be governed by the laws that govern everyone else - and truth be told, religion is capable of great harm. This may not sound like a radical proposition, but it has been under assault since the 1960s. The majority of (...) academics and many religious organizations would construct a fortress around religious conduct that would make it extremely difficult to prosecute child abuse by clergy, medical neglect of children by faith-healers, and other socially unacceptable behaviors. This book intends to change the course of the public debate over religion by bringing to the public's attention the tactics of religious entities to avoid the law and therefore harm others. (shrink)

Part of Allen et al.’s criticism of Hamilton’s rule makes sense only if we are interested in social adaptation rather than merely social selection. Under the assumption that we are interested in casually modeling social adaptation, I illustrate how graphical causal models of social adaptation can be useful for predicting evolution by adaptation. I then argue for two consequences of this approach given some of the recent philosophical literature. I argue Birch’s claim that the proper way to understand (...) Hamilton’s rule is as providing an organizational framework for causal models is incorrect. I provide an account of a causally adequate decomposition of evolutionary change due to social adaptation and show that my account is superior to Okasha’s. (shrink)

"Yoga and life are journeys, and this book is a wonderful guide along the path!"—Greg Louganis, four-time Olympic gold medalist Holistic wisdom for sustained peace Ally Hamilton changed her life with the eight limbs of yoga, a spiritual tradition first recorded in the Yoga Sutras 1,600 years ago. Join Ally as she shows you how to apply the wisdom of this honored tradition to your modern-day life. Physical poses—asanas—are the best-known aspects of yoga, but in the eight limbs practice, healing (...) comes through exploring your relationship to the world and to yourself while learning to recognize the obstacles that block your path. Yoga's Healing Power shows how to create the life you want from the inside out, working with your mind and emotions, your body and breath, your memories and your pain. With hands-on exercises, meditations, journaling prompts, and stories of healing, this book helps you uncover your particular gifts and begin to feel joy. Praise: "Ally is really onto something fantastic with Yoga's Healing Power...We're not talking just physical yoga; this is yoga as a way of life."—Kathryn Budig, author of Aim True "I was deeply humbled and greatly inspired by Ally Hamilton's courageous take on life, love, loss, and surrender."—Claire Bidwell Smith, author of The Rules of Inheritance. (shrink)

Paul MacLean, founder and long-time chief ofthe Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behavior,National Institutes of Health, is a pioneeringfigure in the emergent field of evolutionaryneuroscience. His influence has been widelyfelt in the development of biologicalpsychiatry and has led to a considerableliterature on evolutionary approaches toclinical issues. MacLean's work is alsoenjoying a resurgence of interest in academicareas of neuroscience and evolutionarypsychology which have previously shown littleinterest or knowledge of his extensive work. This chapter builds on MacLean's work to bringtogether new insights (...) into the neuralarchitecture of human development, hierarchy,conflict behavior, and reciprocity in the formof the Conflict Systems Neurobehavioral Model. Hamilton 's rule of kinship altruism orinclusive fitness is proposed to be the gene'seye complement to MacLean's evolutionaryneuroscience and the CSN Model derivedtherefrom. Hierarchy, conflict behavior andreciprocity are also central issues in healthydevelopment as well as in clinical syndromes ofdepression, mania, and other socialmaladjustments. The emerging insights permitthe integration of the concept of inclusivefitness underpinning evolutionary psychologywith MacLean's perspective on evolutionaryneuroscience as well as the definition of newchallenges for mental health and socialstability. The policy implications areindicated. (shrink)

Wittgenstein had little to say directly on philosophy of history. But some pertinent remarks in _On Certainty_ have received little attention, apart from in Elizabeth Anscombe's short article on Hume and Julius Caesar. That article acknowledges its debt to _On Certainty,_ which responses to Anscombe have failed to recognise. Wittgenstein focuses in _On Certainty_ on apparently empirical propositions that seem to be certainties, but in fact form a rule-like framework for judging. I have called these _Moorean propositions_, and the (...) present article develops the suggestion that history as a discipline rests on them. The result is a qualification of empiricism in philosophy of history. (shrink)

"Many theologians, as well as many philosophers, may be heard today asserting that there neither is nor can be any such thing as a uniquely Christian ethical system. On the one hand it is argued that an ethic based on revelation must be inherently static, unable to respond to new demands and situations; but if the ethical code is little more than a refinement of so-called natural law or natural morality, then there is no reason to term it Christian. In (...) consequence, most of the current discussion in the field of ethics addresses itself almost exclusively to a consideration of such specific issues as war, sex, abortion or mercy killing. Professor N. H. G. Robinson, however, turns his attention to the basic question of what Christian ethics really is. Morality, Robinson argues, was not created by Christianity, but exists independently; all men are subject to it, whatever their belief. This fundamental truth about human beings is of profound significance for theology, which must continue to insist upon an objective moral code. We will never understand Christian ethics, Robinson asserts, until we accept the doctrine of natural morality. But there can hardly be two moralities—one natural and the other supernatural—each competing for our obedience. Rejecting both the medieval and the post-Reformation approaches to the relationship of natural and Christian ethics, Robinson looks to the redemptive nature of Christian revelation for his answer. Moral standards are not merely imposed upon us, nor do we invent them; we discover them—their authority depends on their existing independently of us. It is the entry of redemptive revelation into the system of moral philosophy that creates what Robinson describes as "natural morality, judged, reoriented and transformed, and brought under the forgiving and reconciling lordship of Christ, which constitutes the Christian life." Here, then, is no inflexible, static code, incapable of responding to change. Rather, Robinson, describes a creative ethic that is objective, normative, and theocentric, a morality always in the making; it is a way of life, not a closed system. "Moral rules," he overserves, "are yesterday's moral solutions." Teh Groundwork of Christian Ethics is a major contribution to the field of Christian ethics which no serious student can afford to overlook."-Publisher. (shrink)

A large number of cross-references to various bodies of text are used in legal texts, each serving a different purpose. It is often necessary for authorities and companies to look into certain types of these citations. Yet, there is a lack of automatic tools to aid in this process. Recently, citation graphs have been used to improve the intelligibility of complex rule frameworks. We propose an algorithm that builds the citation graph from a document and automatically labels each edge (...) according to its purpose. Our method uses the citing text only and thus works only on citations who’s purpose can be uniquely identified by their surrounding text. This framework is then applied to the US code. This paper includes defining and evaluating a standard gold set of labels that cover a vast majority of citation types which appear in the “US Code” but are still short enough for practical use. We also proposed a novel linear-chain conditional random field model that extracts the features required for labeling the citations from the surrounding text. We then analyzed the effectiveness of different clustering methods such as K-means and support vector machine to automatically label each citation with the corresponding label. Besides this, we talk about the practical difficulties of this task and give a comparison of human accuracy compared to our end-to-end algorithm. (shrink)

Hamilton’s theory of kin selection is the best-known framework for understanding the evolution of social behavior but has long been a source of controversy in evolutionary biology. A recent critique of the theory by Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson sparked a new round of debate, which shows no signs of abating. In this overview, we highlight a number of conceptual issues that lie at the heart of the current debate. We begin by emphasizing that there are various alternative formulations of (...) Hamilton’s rule, including a general version, which is always true; an proximate version, which assumes weak selection; and a special version, which demands other restrictive assumptions. We then examine the relationship between the neighbor-modulated fitness and inclusive fitness approaches to kin selection. Finally, we consider the often-strained relationship between the theories of kin and multilevel selection. (shrink)

In the Coman case, the European Court of Justice was asked whether the term “spouse”—for the purposes of EU law—includes the same-sex spouse of an EU citizen who has moved between EU Member States. The ECJ answered this question affirmatively, holding that a refusal to recognise a same-sex marriage and the resultant refusal to grant family reunification rights to a Union citizen who moves to another Member State, would constitute an unjustified restriction on the right to free movement that Union (...) citizens enjoy under EU law. This case comment analyses the judgment, arguing that the Court’s pronouncement is a very welcome first step towards marriage equality at a cross-border level in the EU. At the same time, following the delivery of this ruling, a lot of questions have arisen and gaps in the protection of same-sex couples persist, and these are also analysed in this piece. (shrink)

This paper attempts to reconcile critics and defenders of inclusive fitness by constructing a synthesis that does justice to the insights of both. I argue that criticisms of the regression-based version of Hamilton’s rule, although they undermine its use for predictive purposes, do not undermine its use as an organizing framework for social evolution research. I argue that the assumptions underlying the concept of inclusive fitness, conceived as a causal property of an individual organism, are unlikely to be (...) exactly true in real populations, but they are approximately true given a specific type of weak selection that Hamilton took, on independent grounds, to be responsible for the cumulative assembly of complex adaptation. Finally, I reflect on the uses and limitations of “design thinking” in social evolution research. The debate about the foundations of inclusive fitness theory that has followed in the wake of Nowak, Tarnita and Wilson’s (1) critique has been remarkably polarizing. After several rounds of rebuttals and replies, there is still little evidence of any serious reconciliation between the theory’s critics (2-10) and its defenders (11-24). It doesn’t have to be this way. I believe that, on the main points of disagreement, it is possible to find a way forward that does justice to the insights of both camps. My aim in this paper is to find that way forward. (shrink)

Inclusive fitness theory provides conditions for the evolutionary success of a gene. These conditions ensure that the gene is selfish in the sense of Dawkins (The selfish gene, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1976): genes do not and cannot sacrifice their own fitness on behalf of the reproductive population. Therefore, while natural selection explains the appearance of design in the living world (Dawkins in The blind watchmaker: why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design, W. W. Norton, New York, (...) 1996), inclusive fitness theory does not explain how. Indeed, Hamilton’s rule is equally compatible with the evolutionary success of prosocial altruistic genes and antisocial predatory genes, whereas only the former, which account for the appearance of design, predominate in successful organisms. Inclusive fitness theory, however, permits a formulation of the central problem of sociobiology in a particularly poignant form: how do interactions among loci induce utterly selfish genes to collaborate, or to predispose their carriers to collaborate, in promoting the fitness of their carriers? Inclusive fitness theory, because it abstracts from synergistic interactions among loci, does not answer this question. Fitness-enhancing collaboration among loci in the genome of a reproductive population requires suppressing alleles that decrease, and promoting alleles that increase the fitness of its carriers. Suppression and promotion are effected by regulatory networks of genes, each of which is itself utterly selfish. This implies that genes, and a fortiori individuals in a social species, do not maximize inclusive fitness but rather interact strategically in complex ways. It is the task of sociobiology to model these complex interactions. (shrink)

This PhD dissertation examines the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the most general and most widely used framework for understanding social evolution, W. D. Hamilton's theory of kin selection. While the core idea is intuitive enough (when organisms share genes, they sometimes have an evolutionary incentive to help one another), its apparent simplicity masks a host of conceptual subtleties, and the theory has proved a perennial source of controversy in evolutionary biology. To move towards a resolution of these controversies, we (...) need a careful and rigorous analysis of the philosophical foundations of the theory. My aim in this work is to provide such an analysis. I begin with an examination of the concepts behavioural ecologists employ to describe and classify types of social behaviour. I stress the need to distinguish concepts that are often conflated: for example, we need to distinguish simple cooperation from collaboration in collective tasks, behaviours from strategies, and control from manipulation and coercion. I proceed from here to the formal representation of kin selection via George R. Price’s covariance selection mathematics. I address a number of interpretative issues the Price formalism raises, including the vexed question of whether kin selection theory is ‘formally equivalent’ to multi-level selection theory. In the second half of the dissertation, I assess the uses and limits of Hamilton’s rule for the evolution of social behaviour; I provide a precise statement of the conditions under which the rival neighbour-modulated fitness and inclusive fitness approaches in contemporary kin selection theory are equivalent (and describe cases in which they are not); and I criticize recent formal attempts to establish the controversial claim that kin selection leads to organisms behaving as if maximizing their inclusive fitness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Basic Theatrical Understanding: Considerations for James HamiltonNoël Carroll (bio)The publication of The Art of Theater by James Hamilton is a seminal event in the philosophy of theater.1 As the first book-length study of theater in the analytic tradition of philosophy, it will be a touchstone for many years of future discussion and debate. Anyone interested in the philosophy of theater will need to address Professor Hamilton’s accomplishment.The leading (...) idea in The Art of Theater is that theatrical performance is an independent art form. That is, theatrical performance, as such, is not, as Aristotle suggested by his demotion of spectacle, a mere adjunct to literature, or essentially a medium for illustrating dramatic and comedic texts. Theatrical performance itself is an art in its own right. This view of theater art has been increasingly apparent in the practices of modern theater in the West, but these practices—as exemplified by Gordon Craig, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Jacques Copeau, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, and, more recently, Robert Wilson—merely revealed what has always been the case: that theater is at root a performing art.Although for centuries theater in the West had been conceptualized as a text-based art, Hamilton maintains that this tradition is local. Theatrical performances in other cultures need not be the enactment of antecedently written-out texts. Furthermore, even within Western culture, most of us see and discuss plays without ever reading the texts upon which they are based. Hamilton takes these facts to support his view that theatrical performance is an autonomous art form. Among other things, this means that the critical model that presumes that the success of a theatrical performance must be assessed against the effectiveness of its implementation of the pertinent preexisting literary text is a misguided one. Although a preexisting literary text may be an ingredient in the production of a theatrical performance, fidelity to the aforesaid text is not mandated by the art of theater. [End Page 15]Insofar as theatrical performance is an art in its own right, it may—and quite clearly, as in the cases of the Performance Group, Kraken, Mabou Mines, etc., often does—adapt written texts for its own purposes. Moreover, refashioning the text, where there is one, is not simply an avant-garde practice; most productions edit the text for their own purposes. Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, which omitted no word from the accepted version of the text, was the exception to the rule. Thus, what Hamilton calls the ingredients model of the relation of texts to theatrical performances has the advantage on its side of better corresponding to actual practices, as compared to the notion that a theatrical performance is to be understood as a matter of bringing a literary text to life.Of course, one apparent advantage that the text-implementation model of theatrical performance might seem to possess is that it appears to have a way ready-to-hand for identifying theatrical performances. Gielgud’s performance, Olivier’s performance, and Burton’s performance are, ex hypothesi, all performances of Hamlet because they are all performances of Shakespeare’s text to which they all roughly comply. If, following Hamilton, we sever the relationship to the play-text, how can we account for the way in which we identify theatrical performances?2 That is, independently of reference to texts, how do we identify a theatrical performance as another instance of Hamlet?In order to solve this problem, Hamilton introduces the idea of “a basic understanding” of a theatrical performance. The basic understanding of a theatrical performance is, on Hamilton’s account, said to involve no more than comprehending on a moment-to-moment basis the ongoing bits of dialogue and stage action as they evolve, as well as understanding the transitions from one scene to another while also responding physically in a suitable manner to the evolving story (for example, laughing where laughter is appropriate) or emoting responsively to what is happening onstage. So, one has a basic understanding of a scene if, when the Musketeer says “On guard,” the spectator takes this to be an invitation to a duel; and when a rival character draws his sword, the... (shrink)

The article “The EU Top Court Rules that Married Same-Sex Couples Can Move Freely Between EU Member States as “Spouses”: Case C-673/16, Relu Adrian Coman, Robert Clabourn Hamilton, Asociaţia Accept v Inspectoratul General pentru Imigrări, Ministerul Afacerilor Interne”, written by “Alina Tryfonidou” was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal on 23 April 2019 without open access.

Name der Zeitschrift: Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Jahrgang: 58 Heft: 2 Seiten: 206-228.

Name der Zeitschrift: Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Jahrgang: 58 Heft: 4 Seiten: 525-548.

Jonathan Edwards′ New England theology has a great deal more to say that is of contemporary doctrinal interest than it is often credited with, particularly as it relates to the doctrine of atonement. This article explores several anomalous claims made be this 18th and 19th century tradition, and in this way, challenges the recent and growing consensus that Edwards espoused the penal substitution model and his successors a moral government model. I argue that of all that is yet to be (...) considered about their doctrine of atonement, we ought to begin with those claims made about the nature and demands of divine justice. (shrink)

Objectives: To investigate the quality of consent gained for the use in research of tissue that is surplus after surgery. To compare the use of two consent forms: a simple locally introduced form and a more complex centrally instigated form. To discuss the attitudes of patients towards the use of their surplus tissue in research.Design: Data were collected through interviews and analysed with a combination of quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques.Participants and setting: Patients of the breast care unit at a (...) teaching hospital were interviewed at home or in a quiet room at the hospital.Results: 57 people were interviewed out of 81 approached, between October 2003 and March 2004. Most participants had a poor level of knowledge about the consent they had given, but reported being happy about having given it. The patients who had signed the locally introduced form had considerably more knowledge than those who had signed the centrally instigated form . Participants considered being well informed to be less important than believing that their opinions were valued and respected.Conclusions: The findings suggest that traditional models of informed consent are not universally applicable and, in this case, seem to overstate what people wish to know. The simple consent form achieved a better quality of informed consent and provided a better model of practice than the complex form, and it seemed that a focused approach to consent seeking is more effective and acceptable than more complex approaches. (shrink)

Hamilton’s Rule, named after the evolutionary biologist Bill Hamilton, and the related concepts of inclusive fitness and kin selection, have been the bedrock of the study of social evolution for the past half century. In ’The Philosophy of Social Evolution’, Jonathan Birch provides a comprehensive introduction to the conceptual foundations of the Hamiltonian view of social evolution, and a passionate defence of its enduring value in face of the recent high profile criticism. In this review essay, I first (...) outline the version of Hamilton’s Rule defended by Birch, dubbed Hamilton’s Rule General, and its derivation. With this in place, I then navigate through the fierce disagreements that Hamilton’s Rule generates among social evolution researchers and evaluate Birch’s central argument of the book that HRG serves as an organizing framework for social evolution research under which we can compare and interpret more detailed causal models. I then spend the remainder of the review discussing what I take to be three of the most exciting implications of Hamilton’s thinking raised by Birch: the extension of Hamilton’s Rule to mobile genetic elements, maximization of inclusive fitness models and the idea of adaptation as organism design, and the relationship between Hamilton’s approaches to social behaviour and the gene’s-eye view of evolution. (shrink)

In the recent history of philosophy few works have appeared which favorably portray Idealism as a plausible philosophical view of the world. Considerably less has been written about Idealism as a viable framework for doing theology. While the most recent and significant works on Idealism, composed by the late John Foster (Case for Idealism and A World for Us: The Case for Phenomenological Idealism), have put this theory back on the philosophical map, no such attempt has been made to re-introduce (...) Idealism to contemporary Christian theology. Idealism and Christian Theology is such a work, retrieving ideas and arguments from its most significant modern exponents (especially George Berkeley and Jonathan Edwards) in order to assess its value for present and future theological construction. As a piece of constructive philosophical-theology itself, this volume considers the explanatory power an Idealist ontology has for contemporary Christian theology. (shrink)

The doctrine of the atonement is a subject of perpetual curiosity for a number of contemporary theologians. The penal substitution theory of atonement in particular has precipitated a great deal of recent interest, being held up by many Protestants as ‘the’ doctrine of atonement. In this essay, we make a defense against the objection to the Anselmian theory of atonement that is often leveled against it by exponents of the Penal Substitution theory, namely, that Christ’s work does not accomplish anything (...) for those whom it appears he undertakes his atoning work, but merely makes provision for salvation. (shrink)

SummaryThe recent atonement literature reveals a growing trend accepting the thesis that the Reformer’s doctrine just is the biblical doctrine of penal substitution. This is the claim of William Lane Craig in his recent works on the atonement. In the present article, we challenge these set of claims in Craig’s recent works and advance an alternative theory of the atonement that has some significant footing in the Reformed theological tradition, most notably reflected in the theologian, William Ames. Finally, we lay (...) out several reasons why Craig’s doctrine of the atonement fails to capture the biblical data on the atonement and fails to avoid the legal fiction problem parasitic on most, if not all, accounts of penal substitution. (shrink)

From mitochondria to meerkats, the natural world is full of spectacular examples of social behaviour. In the early 1960s W. D. Hamilton changed the way we think about how such behaviour evolves. He introduced three key innovations - now known as Hamilton's rule, kin selection, and inclusive fitness - and his pioneering work kick-started a research program now known as social evolution theory. This is a book about the philosophical foundations and future prospects of that program. [Note: only the (...) Introduction is available to download.]. (shrink)

Alexander Hamilton presents his early formative years, sharing the way his engagement with the cyanotype process has informed his art practice, from his time at Edinburgh College of Art, to his program of exhibitions and residencies, through to his work within the field of public arts. This personal history is combined with essays by academics, scholars and curators who engage with the intellectual roots of his work and practice. A comprehensive selection of Hamilton’s photography, including his unique plant-based cyanotypes, (...) completes this beautiful book. (shrink)

Aesthetics and Music is a rich and interesting study. Hamilton's approach is innovative. He interleaves chapters on the history of philosophical thought about music with more theoretical discussions of music, sound, rhythm and improvisation, but does not cover the work–performance relation, depiction or expression. He draws on an atypically broad range of examples, including avant-garde, medieval, non-Western and jazz. The assumptions are humanist: ‘I wish to argue for an aesthetic conception of music as an art … according to which music (...) is a human activity grounded in the body and bodily movement and interfused with human life’.The historical chapters are valuable and not without analysis and criticism. Hamilton shows how the ancient Greek theorists were more interested in music's mathematical properties as reflecting the underlying harmony of relations between cosmic bodies than in the practice of musicians. While they equated the value of art with its contribution to an education for citizenship and while their concept of the arts differed …. (shrink)

This paper addresses methodological and metatheoretical aspects of the ongoing debate over the adaptive significance of Tibetan polyandry. Methodological contributions include a means of estimating relatedness of fraternal co-husbands given multigenerational polyandry, and use of Hamilton’s rule and a member-joiner model to specify how inclusive fitness gains of co-husbands may vary according to seniority, opportunity costs, and group size. These methods are applied to various data sets, particularly that of Crook and Crook (1988). The metatheoretical discussion pivots on (...) the critique by evolutionary psychologists of adaptationist accounts of polyandry. Contrary to this critique, I argue that valid adaptationist explanations of such practices do not necessitate cognitive mechanisms evolved specifically to produce polyandry, nor that there must have been exact equivalents of Tibetan agricultural estates and social institutions in human evolutionary history. Specific issues raised when one posits either kin selection or cultural evolution to explain the adaptive features of Tibetan polyandry are also discussed. (shrink)

Intended for logicians and mathematicians, this text is based on Dr. Hamilton's lectures to third and fourth year undergraduates in mathematics at the ...

This paper attempts to reconcile critics and defenders of inclusive fitness by constructing a synthesis that does justice to the insights of both. I argue that criticisms of the regression-based version of Hamilton’s rule, although they undermine its use for predictive purposes, do not undermine its use as an organizing framework for social evolution research. I argue that the assumptions underlying the concept of inclusive fitness, conceived as a causal property of an individual organism, are unlikely to be (...) exactly true in real populations, but they are approximately true given a specific type of weak selection that Hamilton took, on independent grounds, to be responsible for the cumulative assembly of complex adaptation. Finally, I reflect on the uses and limitations of “design thinking” in social evolution research. The debate about the foundations of inclusive fitness theory that has followed in the wake of Nowak, Tarnita and Wilson’s (1) critique has been remarkably polarizing. After several rounds of rebuttals and replies, there is still little evidence of any serious reconciliation between the theory’s critics (2-10) and its defenders (11-24). It doesn’t have to be this way. I believe that, on the main points of disagreement, it is possible to find a way forward that does justice to the insights of both camps. My aim in this paper is to find that way forward. (shrink)

Can altruism be reconciled with evolutionary theory? Philosopher of biology, Jonathan Birch, discusses “Hamilton’s Rule”.

Sympathy refers to caring about another to some degree as one cares for oneself. Empathy refers to the capacity to put yourself in the position of others to see things from their point of view. Empathetic preferences compare being one person in one situation with being another person in another situation. John Harsanyi showed that mild assumptions imply that to have empathetic preferences is the same thing as having rates at which the utility units of different people are to be (...) traded off against one another. A consequence is that empathetic preferences have the same structure as Hamilton's rule, and so may have originated from strangers adopted into a clan being treated as surrogate kinfolk. But since empathetic preferences are cultural artifacts, they are subject to cultural evolution. The idea of an empathy equilibrium is introduced to capture the medium-run effects of such cultural evolution on empathetic preferences. (shrink)

I propose that a dishonest signaling system can be evolutionarily stable in eusocial animal societies if the amount of dishonesty is balanced by the chance of non-reproductive workers to advance to the reproductive caste in the future. I express this trade-off in a modified form of Hamilton’s rule, where I distinguish between the real and perceived cost of an altruistic act, and between the real and perceived genetic relatedness between colony members. Furthermore, I elaborate how the vertebrate neuromodulator (...) oxytocin could serve as an internal representation of the perceived cost of an altruistic act and of perceived relatedness. Behavioral and receptor localization data support this hypothesis. The encoding of cost and relatedness by oxytocin is likely integrated with a number of other functions related to social bonding. I conclude with a discussion of honesty in signaling, an outline of testable consequences of this hypothesis, and a comparison between vertebrate and insect eusociality. (shrink)

The puzzle of how altruism can evolve has been at the center of recent debates over Hamilton’s Rule, inclusive fitness, and kin-selection. In this paper, I use recent debates over altruism and Hamilton’s legacy as an example to illustrate a more general problem in evolutionary theory that has philosophical significance; I attempt to explain this significance and to draw a variety of conclusions about it. The problem is that specific behaviours and general concepts of organism agency and (...) intentionality are defined in terms of concepts of evolutionary “costs” and “benefits,” and these terms have determined the role that agency should play in evolutionary explanation. However, costs, benefits, and agency are not only or even best conceived through evolutionary effects in a biological context. The paper proceeds as follows: first, I explain how the issue of agency relates to the evolutionary puzzle of altruism. Next, I discuss how questions about agency have figured in recent debates over Hamilton’s legacy. In the final section, I argue that Denis Walsh’s “situated Darwinism,” which attempts to return the organism to central status in biological explanation, offers a more productive route for thinking about different forms of costs, benefits, and agency. Finally, I argue that the upshot of all this is that there may be many different, and equally valid, ways to express what organisms are doing and how they are behaving based on different currencies of cost and benefit—even if these may stand in some tension. I illustrate this through returning to the case of altruism and using examples to show that even in non-humans there can be many forms of altruism, even if they are not all biological altruism as defined in the conventional evolutionary terms. (shrink)

This article studies the evolution of altruism. We consider a model in which a population of agents are assortatively matched to play some asymmetric two-player game, and evolution operates at the level of behavior rules. We find that the relationship between the evolutionarily stable level of altruism and the index of assortativity of matching is determined by two novel features: whether the total payoff function of the game exhibits complementarity or substitutability; whether the two players’ strategies affect each other’s fitness (...) in the same direction or the opposite. These two features combined generalize the stability conditions related to Hamilton’s rule to a class of asymmetric games. (shrink)

The consequences of restricting or not restricting the right to freedom of assembly are potentially magnified in transitional societies. Yet determining whether such consequences are indeed ‘harmful’, and whether their cost should be borne despite the harms caused, requires the elaboration of criteria which define what are valid and relevant harms. While a human rights framework can perform this task, open-textured rights standards prescribe neither the threshold of legal intervention nor the goals of transition. By extension, the rule of (...) law—underpinned by this rights discourse—is silent about whether liberal or communitarian ideals should inform the reconstruction of public space in conflicted or nascent democracies. Illustrated by analysis of legal interventions in parade disputes in Northern Ireland, this article argues that the rule of law is necessarily orientated by ethical consensus about its scope. Furthermore, this consensus operates as a restraint upon the degree of normative discontinuity permitted during transitional compromises. The article frames the ethical options in terms of three liberty-limiting principles—the argument from democracy, the argument for toleration, and the argument for recognition. Each suggests different parameters for the transitional project and for the role of law within it. (shrink)

In this interview, the previous editor-in-chief of Theoria, Lawrence Hamilton, describes the evolution of Theoria to become a journal with more Southern political theory scholars and ideas, and how this was inspired by the limitations of Northern theory alone in understanding real world political problems in South Africa especially. He traces the evolution of this thought in becoming a more ‘decolonial’ type thinker through his own work, and how this intersected with Theoria's focus, with specific reference to special issues of (...) the journal including ‘Freedom and Power’ in 2013, ‘Empire and Economics’ in 2016 and a series of African-focussed editions in 2018, 2019 and 2021. At the heart of this lived experienced of intellectual development is a validation of the importance of context-based theory and theorising that is nevertheless still engaged with northern thought and global issues. This intellectual history helps clarify Theoria's current substantive focus. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of health and disease have traditionally been dominated by a debate between normativists, who hold that health is an inescapably value-laded concept and naturalists, such as Christopher Boorse, who believe that it is possible to derive a purely descriptive or theoretical definition of health based upon biological function. In this paper I defend a distinctive view which traces its origins in Aristotle's naturalistic ethics. An Arisotelian would agree with Boorse that health and disease are ubiquitous features of the (...) natural world and thus not mere projections of human interests and values. She would differ from him in rejecting the idea that value is a non-natural quality. I conclude my discussion with some comments of the normative character of living systems. (shrink)

In The Blue Book, Wittgenstein defined a category of uses of “I” which he termed “I”-as-subject, contrasting them with “I”-as-object uses. The hallmark of this category is immunity to error through misidentification (IEM). This article extends Wittgenstein’s characterisation to the case of memory-judgments, discusses the significance of IEM for self-consciousness—developing the idea that having a first-person thought involves thinking about oneself in a distinctive way in which one cannot think of anyone or anything else—and refutes a common objection to the (...) claim that memory-judgments exhibit IEM. (shrink)

First published in 1989, Towards a Theory of Schooling explores and debates the relationship between school and society. It examines the form and function of one of humankind’s most important social institutions, following the cutting edge of pedagogic innovation from mainland Europe through the British Isles to the USA. In the process, the book throws important light upon the origins and evolution of the school based notions of class, curriculum, classroom, recitation and class teaching.

This article serves as an introduction to the laws-of-biology debate. After introducing the main issues in an introductory section, arguments for and against laws of biology are canvassed in Section 2. In Section 3, the debate is placed in wider epistemological context by engaging a group of scholars who have shifted the focus away from the question of whether there are laws of biology and toward offering good accounts of explanation(s) in the biological sciences. Section 4 introduces two relatively new (...) pieces of science – metabolic scaling theory and ecological stoichiometry – that have not been topics of much discussion by philosophers but are relevant because they have at least some of the hallmarks of laws of nature. Section 5 concludes by pointing out that discovering laws of biology, if any there be, will not necessarily answer the questions raised by the debate in the first place: we will still want to know how biology compares to other sciences, how to characterize its systems and processes, and whether accounts in terms of laws always or usually constitute adequate explanations in various sciences. (shrink)

A humanistic account of self-consciousness and personal identity, and offering a structural parallel between the epistemology of memory and bodily awareness. It provides a much-needed rapprochement between Analytic and Phenomenological approaches, developing Wittgenstein's insights into "I"-as-subject and self-identification.