HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011068.jpg

peacock’s tail feathers are an encumbrance in running from predators. And why give the expensive displays mostly to males? Why do males exist at all in species where they contribute genes but no care? We just saw the answer to the first. Answers to the second two again build on an insight of Trivers in 1973. Males produce cheap sperm carrying genes alone. Females produce eggs packed with costly nutrients. A male can pass genes to many descendants through many mates if they approve his signs. That speeds up the fight against parasites. Nature evolved males and their self-promoting signs and their contests for fastest spread of antidote genes to catch up to shifts in parasite load. Where Do Losers Go? A key point in the Hamilton-Zuk theory is that losers’ genes in the beauty contest are typically not driven to extinction. They are driven to low frequencies until needed again. Kin selection, up to a point, helps maintain genic diversity by preserving current losers within the gene pool. Selection pressures punish and restrain kin selection when it conflicts with preservation of other genes whose time will come again. | met Hamilton at a conference in Squaw Valley, where Bob Trivers had helped us attract him, and told him this reason why I thought his 1982 paper helped complete and qualify his 1964 paper. He was the absent-minded professor to perfection. Moody, distracted, profound. He smiled, a rare thing for him, and said “It’s been a long search.” This explains what I mean by lineage survival or fitness. Much of this book assumes its maximization even among modern humans, who create our own urban environments in place of the ancestral savanna for which we were adapted. And much of economic history, although written in cities by city-dwellers, appears to assume the same. Chapter 2 listed some examples. Let’s review them. There was Petty’s of 1662. The similar equilibrium wage theories of Smith and Ricardo expected pay to converge to the level maintaining and replacing the work force, which is trusted to spend it on both. Malthus’ population principle in 1798 and 1801 Chapter 7 Petty’s Idea 2/3/16 9 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011068