From: Martin Nowak To: Jeffrey Epstein <[email protected]> Subject: Fwd: [Fwd: in memory of George Williams] Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2010 13:40:48 +0000 karl is finally drawn into action!! Begin forwarded message: From: Karl Sigmund Date: September 11, 2010 4:37:13 AM EDT To: I , Martin Nowak Subject: Re: [Fwd: in memory of George Williams) <M > Dear Bob, Martin keeps me abreast of the letters he receives re eusociality. I must say that I greatly prefer this new one of you to that other letter ('127 experts against Nowak') where your voice was just one of the chorus. Whenever I read eqvatch, I know who is speaking. I do not harbor great illusions that your relationship with Martin could ever be repaired. Moreover, I emphatically will not be able to beat any sense into Martins Kopf. But I would like to explore how far you and I agree on what is sense. What strikes me most about the Nature paper is the fact that it is a hybrid, even a chimera, consisting of two widely separate parts. There is the Nowak-Wilson part. It really deals with the evolution of eusocial behavior (I use the definition in your sense, and think it blurs the issue to include birds etc.) I do not underestimate the role of haplo- diploidity, but whoever believes that a construction of eusociality can be entirely based on this should beware of termites) In any case, this is a hugely important question, but strangely, not the one which raises all that fuss. This is the second part, Nowak-Tarnita. It deals with inclusive fitness. This is not the same thing as kin selection I In contrast to Martin, I think that indirect fitness is a useful concept, and that inclusive fitness can, in principle at least, be well defined even without all the assumptions about weak selection etc. Like with the Price equation, we are talking about a method of book-keeping. It is a matter of taste whether one finds it enlightening or not. But it is certainly possible to use alternative methods of acco