Philosophical musings on Darwinism, Hamilton's rule, and economics

It got Darwinism backward. Darwin's idea was that the best-adapted leave most progeny, not that leaving most progeny or other close kin somehow bootstraps itself into adaptiveness. The math of Hamilton’s rule didn’t work either. In diploids like us, where each parent carries two sets of chromosomes, closest relatedness without inbreeding is ¥. That meant that fitness would have to double or more with each generation. The reason is that fitness not expected to be transmitted to successors would bea contradiction in terms. If it cannot be transmitted (invested) at less than a 2:1 efficiency ratio (benefit/cost ratio), then it must be expected to double or more with each reinvestment. But aardvarks and flatfish aren’t 1024 times fitter than their ancestors of ten generations ago. They aren’t even a smidgen fitter, by any measure of fitness known to me, unless the population has grown. Population growth in nature usually fluctuates around zero. But his rule was right in important ways. Nepotism is common in nature. The Trust passed my father’s wealth to direct descendants. Most wills do, or favor nephews and nieces as a secondary choice. Chimp mothers maneuver to push their offspring up the social ladder. Worker ants and bees, who don’t breed, push the chances of their younger half-sisters. Hamilton’s rule was clearly a good rule of thumb, even though the math needed tuning. Why should it usually work? I couldn’t know then that Hamilton himself would find the biggest missing piece of the puzzle in 1982. Economics was always somewhere on my screen. It was the biggest challenge because | had to reinvent it from scratch. | had dropped the course at USF because I couldn't find the foundations. But we don’t build a foundation without knowing what we want to top. I had to reinvent everything at once. Does that mean | thought I was best qualified for such a task? No. Plenty of people are better at logic than I am. Rather I seemed to be the only volunteer. Explicit economic axioms are seen as a nineteenth century thing. There are implicit ones to a degree. Macroeconomics is said to rest on microeconomics, and microeconomics on the logic of supply and demand. Good so far. But I felt the need Chapter 1: Recollections 1/06/16 17 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_010933