Trying to understand how to use and apply Hamilton’s theory of senescence to understanding our old Herero material, I asked my colleague Alan Rogers for a suggestion. He suggested his own textbook written for his course on evolutionary ecology.
It is a marvel. If you want to catch up on life history theory read chapter 16, “Life History Evolution”, starting on page 114. And, the price is right.
Does Hamilton’s theory account for outlier phenotypes that stay healthy and sharp well into old age? Would group selection be a better way to account for the persistence of phenotypes that are only advantageous at extremely low frequencies? They can’t be much help to immediate kin, but large groups with a few elders probably did better in the long term than those with none. The precise genetic mechanism might consist of a bunch of high frequency alleles that produce a longevity phenotype only when inherited in certain infrequent sets.
You might want to fix the link, you left out the semi-colon.
Urr…I mean the colon.
I wish he would have used r ,instead of an expensive piece of commercial software.
Alan is a big fan of R and uses it to teach statistics and data analysis. Unfortunately the big symbolic players are Maple and Mathematica, both commercial, but there is a lot of hope for Sage.
Sage, yo: http://www.sagemath.org/
I was sorely disapointed in the answer to the great question asked on page 57 “How long do great tits stay in patches?” I must confess I don’t give a damn about a bunch of equations that help to find how quick birds disperse. The apple of my eye is the peach with the great pear. Im an avid gardener and was weaned on playboy as a horny young lad so I would simply love to grow a big patch of great tits.