chimpanzee compound near the linear reaction at Stanford. Clark Howell briefed us on his work at Torralba and Ambrona in Spain, where our ancestors half our size had hunted elephants twice the size of modern ones. (Elephants go back at least as far as mammoths and mastodons.) Desmond Clark covered African archaeology in general and his discoveries at Kalambo Falls in particular. Sherry Washburn showed
the way in which our DNA is 98% the same as a chimp’s. All were my close friends.
It was at a symposium in 1974, in Washington | believe, that I first heard and met Irv DeVore. His talk was on evolutionary biology and Hamilton’s rule. Both were new to me. Irv was a champion speaker. Students packed his anthropology classes at
Harvard. He became a Leakey stalwart and a particularly close friend.
I liked his topic. Genes code for traits, and traits more adaptive to niche pressures are likelier to carry the genes that encode them into the next generation. The likeliness is “fitness”. A beauty of this is that you can predict traits from the environment (niche), and the environment from traits. That promised the kind of
logical challenge that I loved.
Survival of the fittest was not news to us. What was news was that bright scientists like Irv were specializing in that logic, and making testable predictions for creatures generally, humans included, rather than sticking to the groups they studied most.
That meant people | could talk to.
Hamilton’s rule was put up as the prime example. It starts from the principle that the end game in biology is investment in the next generation. Hamilton had reasoned in 1965 that genes coding for most efficient investment in closest kin, who were likeliest to carry copies of those genes, ought to leave most copies in the next generation. We would invest in them when consanguinity was greater than
cost/benefit ratio measured in fitness given up and fitness gained at the other end.
I didn’t like this. Something was missing. The logic was seductive. But Achilles does overtake the tortoise. Traits compete, like those racers, for niche space. The winner
is the fittest at meeting needs of the niche. Hamilton’s rule seemed to leave that out.
Chapter 1: Recollections 1/06/16 16
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_010932