Sublime

While there are several candidates for the most important equation in evolutionary biology, I would pick Price’s Equation, which in its simplest formulation reads: ▵cov(vi, zi) change in average characteristic = covariance(relative fitness, characteristic). This is a very powerful and general formula. For example, a particular gene for height can b

Polygamy: individuals of one sex have just one reproductive partner, but individuals of the other sex have multiple partners. Subtypes include: Polygyny: (poly—many, gyn—female): One male and multiple females Polyandry: (poly—many, andr—male): One female and multiple males.

The value (“fitness”) of a given combination of building blocks often cannot be predicted by a summing up of values assigned to the component blocks. This nonlinearity (commonly called epistasis in genetics) leads to co-adapted sets of blocks (alleles) that serve to bias sampling and add additional layers to the hierarchy.

In biology, that tendency to overemphasise the role of causal factors over chance can lead to ‘hyperadaptionism’, where every facet of the structure and function of an organism is interpreted as an adaptation with a particular function that has been evolutionarily selected for. We know this is foolish, as we have plenty of examples of whole suites

Galton was, in essence, able to establish some of the practical consequences of Mendelian genetics without the benefit of knowing any genetics, nearly two decades before Mendel’s work was rediscovered.

what is really interesting is the question of what drives life, what explains animal behavior and what explains the correspondence between organism and environment. This is the question. The mechanism of heredity or the means by which a species is shaped, natural or unnatural selection, which is really Darwin’s only insight, is the least interestin

“Since Darwin,” she writes, “we have assumed that humans evolved in families where a mother relied on one male to help her rear her young in a nuclear family; yet…the diversity of human family arrangements…is better predicted by assuming that our ancestors evolved as cooperative breeders.”

If we compare gibbons, which are monogamous, with baboons, which are not, we see that baboons have marked sexual size dimorphism and enlarged canines. Polygyny—which is associated with strategies two and three from the previous chapter—leads inexorably both to male-male violence and to the morphology that enables that violence.