Diversity supports Capitalism, and Communalism requires a lack of diversity (3/10/2000)

Dr. Hamilton, a professor at Oxford University since 1984, burst into the field of evolution while still a graduate student at Cambridge University.

In 1963 and 1964, he published two papers based on his doctoral work that have proved so seminal to evolutionary biology that it is virtually impossible to read a contemporary study in the discipline without encountering his name and the term he coined, inclusive fitness, also known as kin selection.

Through the model of inclusive fitness, Dr. Hamilton proposed an elegant and mathematically sophisticated way of understanding altruistic behavior, a problem that had baffled naturalists from Darwin onward.

If organisms are inherently selfish, and supposedly devoted to personal survival and reproduction, why, scientists wondered, do so many species display seemingly self-sacrificial behavior? Why, for example, do worker bees forsake the opportunity to breed in favor of caring for the queen's young? And why will those infertile auntie bees commit suicide in defense of the hive?

Dr. Hamilton realized that the unusual genetic structure of the bees resulted in the workers being so closely related to one another that, in slaving for the hive, they were essentially slaving for the persistence of their own gene pool. In other words, although they appeared altruistic, they were, from a gene's-eye view, behaving with characteristic selfishness.

Dr. Hamilton thus recast the concept of fitness, that is, an individual's success in reproducing, to incorporate the survival and reproductive success of the creature's close relatives -- hence the term inclusive fitness.

In so doing, he merged Darwin's focus on individual animals competing for the privilege of siring the next generation with Mendel's studies of how distinct genetic traits are transmitted over time.

The idea can be roughly understood by one biologist's remark in a pub that he would "gladly die for two brothers, four cousins or eight second cousins," each of them carrying the requisite percentage of the individual's genes to compensate for the mortal deed.

Though human altruism is more complicated than that, and people are capable of behaving with profound self-sacrifice for nonrelatives, research has shown that the general principles of inclusive fitness and kin selection apply throughout the natural world, and in many human transactions as well.

---snip--- My comments Altruism is bad for the individual, but may be good for the group. This implies that as biological diversity grows in the human species, we will be less willing to engage in disaster relief.

Note that this has little to do with the actual level of genetic diversity, but rather with the perception. If we look at the others as Different, then we are less likely to help. If we look at them as the same, then we would help.

Now consider the US Soldiers and Marines in Iraq. If the Iraqi people perceive the US service men as different, they they will not report to their authorities on suspicious activities. If they see the US as like them, then they are more likely.

This suggests that there is a tipping point where a lot of perceptions can change all at once.

So this means that socialist governments tend to turn into racist governments. National Socialism can not be separated from its drive toward racism.

Capitalist governments on the other hand, can accept diversity, success from people not like you, and failure from people like you, because it isnt like you were their twin!

Diversity is in the eye of the beholder.

cause of death was malaria contracted on a recent expedition to Congo.

Murder by Environmentalisim. DDT would have prevented the malaria that killed him and millions of others.

Good point. A scientist killed by bad science. Pity.

(It took just 15 seconds for that severed head to die, and 1500 years will not produce another head like it. (comment on Lavoisier's death by guillotine.)

"the cause of death was malaria contracted on a recent expedition to Congo. He was there seeking evidence to bolster a radical hypothesis that the AIDS epidemic can be traced to contaminated polio vaccines."

Stupid way to die.

"Friends said he was reclusive, almost shy, but that he was also a risk-taker, physically as well as intellectually."

This would make more sense if it were written as, "he was shy, almost reclusive"

Perhaps he was shy on good days.

They say the extrovert engineer looks at the other guy's shoes.