The Big Picture

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Fitness is hard to quantify in a reliable way that every one would agree onye. The idea of kin selection and inclusive fitness was introduced by william bill hamilton, who published two papers in the 19 sixties. Hamilton realized that you shouldn't just think about for organisms, the offspring that a specific individual has, but should also account for other offspring that this focal individual is corsally responsible for. Fitness scaled by the relatedness that you have to those individuals, in a way that if your brother has it, that counts more than if your cousin does it, and so on. That then can be maximized under certain circumstances - even though they do not personally have any

One of the brilliant achievements of Darwin’s theory of natural selection was to help explain apparently “purposeful” or “designed” aspects of biology in a purely mechanistic theory of unguided evolution. Features are good if they help organisms survive. But should we put organisms at the center of our attention, or the genetic information that governs those features? Arvid Ågren helps us understand the attraction of the “selfish gene” view of evolution, as well as its shortcomings. This biological excursion has deep connections to philosophical issues of levels and emergence.

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Arvid Ågren received his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Toronto. He is currently a Wenner-Gren Fellow at the Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University. Previously he worked at Cornell and Harvard. His recent book is The Gene’s-Eye View of Evolution.

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