Limitations of inclusive fitness

Abstract

Until recently, inclusive fitness has been widely accepted as a general method to explain the evolution of social behavior. Affirming and expanding earlier criticism, we demonstrate that inclusive fitness is instead a limited concept, which exists only for a small subset of evolutionary processes. Inclusive fitness assumes that personal fitness is the sum of additive components caused by individual actions. This assumption does not hold for the majority of evolutionary processes or scenarios. To sidestep this limitation, inclusive fitness theorists have proposed a method using linear regression. On the basis of this method, it is claimed that inclusive fitness theory (i) predicts the direction of allele frequency changes, (ii) reveals the reasons for these changes, (iii) is as general as natural selection, and (iv) provides a universal design principle for evolution. In this paper we evaluate these claims, and show that all of them are unfounded. If the objective is to analyze whether mutations that modify social behavior are favored or opposed by natural selection, then no aspect of inclusive fitness theory is needed.social evolution | Hamilton's rule | cooperation | kin selection

Natural selection drives the evolution of ant life cycles

“…Relatedness-based arguments, such as the monogamy window hypothesis, are not necessarily wrong but rarely provide a complete picture; moreover, one cannot rely on inclusive fitness to determine when they are correct. The failure of inclusive fitness theory to provide exact calculations is not surprising, because a mathematically meaningful approach to inclusive fitness (72) cannot be performed for the majority of evolutionary processes (5), and the linear regression method (73-75) does not provide meaningful insights and cannot make empirical predictions (76). In general it is not possible to study social evolution from the perspective of an individual by evoking the virtual quantity of inclusive fitness.…”

Evolution of social behaviour in the primitively eusocial waspRopalidia marginata: do we need to look beyond kin selection?

“…The first is the publication of Nowak et al [4] (see also [5,6]). Personally, I have no basis to rule out the possibility that they may be right in their claim that the mathematics of inclusive fitness may be wrong or may have limited applicability [22] and there is no resolution in sight [21,23,24]. I am therefore more interested in their claim that old-fashioned, standard population genetic modelling can serve equally well (never mind whether better) in understanding the evolution of social behaviour.…”

Número complet

“…Por otro lado, las bases evolutivas de la cooperación social tienen, en la «reciprocidad fuerte», una de las motivaciones más poderosas (Gintis, 2003;Allen et al, 2013). La comunidad ausente de las generaciones futuras difícilmente puede concurrir directamente al duo Topofilia, paisaje y sostenibilidad del territorio Enrahonar 53, 2014 71 dest de la reciprocidad fuerte.…”