W. D. Hamilton facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
W. D. Hamilton
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| Born |
William Donald Hamilton
1 August 1936 |
| Died | 7 March 2000 (aged 63) Fitzrovia, London, United Kingdom
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| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | University College London London School of Economics St. John's College, Cambridge |
| Known for | Kin selection, Hamilton's rule |
| Spouse(s) | Christine Friess |
| Children | Three daughters |
| Parent(s) | Archibald Milne Hamilton and Bettina Matraves Hamilton née Collier |
| Awards | Newcomb Cleveland Prize (1981) Linnean Medal (1989) Kyoto Prize (1993) Crafoord Prize (1993) Sewall Wright Award (1998) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Evolutionary biology |
| Academic advisors | John Hajnal Cedric Smith |
| Doctoral students | Laurence Hurst Olivia Judson |
| Influences | Ronald Fisher |
| Influenced | Richard Dawkins |
William Donald Hamilton (born August 1, 1936 – died March 7, 2000) was a British scientist who studied evolution. He is known as one of the most important thinkers in evolution during the 20th century.
Hamilton became famous for his ideas about how altruism (when an animal helps another, even if it harms itself) could exist because of genes. This idea was a big part of understanding how evolution works by focusing on genes. He also helped start the field of sociobiology, which looks at how social behaviors evolve. Hamilton also did important work on how many males and females are born (called sex ratios) and the evolution of sex. From 1984 until he died in 2000, he was a professor at Oxford University.
Contents
Early life and interests
Hamilton was born in 1936 in Cairo, Egypt. He was the second of seven children. His parents were from New Zealand. His father was an engineer, and his mother was a doctor. The family later moved to Kent, England. During World War II, Hamilton was sent to Edinburgh for safety.
He loved nature from a young age. He spent his free time collecting butterflies and other insects. In 1946, he found a book called Butterflies by E. B. Ford. This book taught him about natural selection, genetics, and population genetics, which are all key ideas in evolution.
He went to Tonbridge School. When he was 12, he was seriously hurt while playing with some old explosives. He had to have surgery and lost parts of his fingers. It took him six months to get better.
Before going to University of Cambridge, he traveled in France. He also completed two years of national service (like military training). As a student at St. John's College, he felt that many biology teachers didn't really believe in evolution, which made him feel uninspired.
Hamilton's rule: Helping relatives
Hamilton studied demography, which is the study of human populations. Later, his work became more about math and genetics.
Other scientists had noticed that animals sometimes help their close relatives, which could help their own genes survive. But they hadn't fully understood or explained it. Hamilton realized that a special number, called the coefficient of relationship, was key. This led to his famous idea, called Hamilton's rule.
Hamilton's rule says that an animal is more likely to do something helpful (but costly to itself) if:
Here's what the letters mean:
- C is the cost to the animal doing the helping (like using energy or risking its life).
- r is how closely related the helper and the one being helped are (for example, siblings are more related than cousins).
- B is the benefit to the animal being helped (like having more babies).
So, if the benefit to the relative, multiplied by how closely related they are, is greater than the cost to the helper, then the helpful action is likely to happen. His two important papers from 1964, called The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour, are now widely used in biology.
At first, his work was not widely noticed. But over time, people realized how important it was, and it is now taught in many biology classes.
This rule helps explain why some insects, like ants, bees, and wasps, live in large social groups where many individuals help raise their sisters instead of having their own offspring. This is because, in their special genetic system, females are more closely related to their sisters than to their own potential children.
Spiteful behaviour
In 1970, Hamilton also thought about "spiteful behavior." This is when an animal harms another without seeming to get any direct benefit itself. He suggested that this could happen if harming others who are less related helps an animal's own genes get passed on more easily.
However, he believed that truly spiteful behavior is rare and usually not very complex. This is because harming others can lead to revenge, and it's hard to pick targets for spite when most animals are somewhat related.
Unusual sex ratios
From 1964 to 1977, Hamilton taught at Imperial College London. There, he wrote a paper about "extraordinary sex ratios." Normally, in many animals, about half the babies born are male and half are female (a 1:1 ratio). But some animals, especially certain wasps, have very different ratios. Hamilton figured out why this happens, which opened up a whole new area of research.
His paper also introduced the idea of an "unbeatable strategy." This idea was later developed into the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) by other scientists. An ESS is a strategy that, if most members of a population adopt it, cannot be beaten by any other strategy. This concept is used in game theory, which studies how individuals make decisions when their success depends on what others do.
Hamilton was a visiting professor at Harvard University and also spent time in Brazil. From 1978, he was a professor at the University of Michigan. His arrival there caused some protests from students who didn't like his connection to sociobiology. While there, he worked with a political scientist named Robert Axelrod on a famous problem called the prisoner's dilemma, which looks at why cooperation happens.
Hamilton was not known as a great lecturer. However, his ideas became very popular thanks to the book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, published in 1976.
Chasing the Red Queen: Why sex evolved
Hamilton was one of the first to support the Red Queen hypothesis for why sex evolved. This idea is named after a character in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. In the story, the Red Queen has to keep running just to stay in the same place.
The theory suggests that sex evolved because it helps species fight off parasites. When animals reproduce sexually, their offspring get new and different combinations of genes. This makes it harder for parasites to adapt to them. So, species with sex are always "running away" from their parasites by changing their genetic makeup. In turn, parasites also evolve to get around these new gene combinations, creating an endless race between hosts and parasites.
Return to Britain and later life
In 1980, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society, which is a very important scientific group in the UK. In 1984, he became a Royal Society Research Professor at Oxford University, where he stayed until he died.
His collected scientific papers, called Narrow Roads of Gene Land, started to be published in 1996. The first book was about the evolution of social behavior.
Social evolution
The study of social evolution looks at how social behaviors change over time. Hamilton's Rule is very important in this field. Social behaviors are actions that affect not only the animal doing the action but also other animals.
Hamilton suggested that social behaviors can be grouped based on whether they help or harm the animal doing the action and the animal receiving the action.
- A behavior that helps both the actor and the recipient is called mutually beneficial.
- A behavior that helps the actor but harms the recipient is called selfish.
- A behavior that harms the actor but helps the recipient is called altruistic.
- A behavior that harms both the actor and the recipient is called spiteful.
Hamilton first came up with this way of classifying behaviors in 1964.
Expedition to the Congo and death
In the 1990s, Hamilton became interested in a theory about the origin of HIV (the virus that causes AIDS). To gather more information for his research, he traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in early 2000.
Hamilton returned to London on January 29, 2000. He became ill and was admitted to a hospital. He died on March 7, 2000. It was found that he died from complications related to a stomach problem and internal bleeding, which may have been made worse by malaria he caught during his trip to Africa.
A memorial service was held for him at New College, Oxford. He was buried near Wytham Woods.
The second book of his collected papers, Evolution of Sex, was published in 2002. The third and final book, Last Words, came out in 2005.
In 1966, he married Christine Friess, and they had three daughters: Helen, Ruth, and Rowena. They separated after 26 years. Later, he found companionship with Maria Luisa Bozzi, an Italian science journalist.
Awards and honors
- 1978 Foreign Honorary Member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- 1980 Fellow of the Royal Society of London
- 1982 Newcomb Cleveland Prize
- 1988 Darwin Medal of the Royal Society of London
- 1989 Scientific Medal of the Linnean Society
- 1991 Frink Medal of Zoological Society of London
- 1993 Crafoord Prize
- 1993 Kyoto Prize
- 1995 Fyssen Prize
- 1997 Honorary title of Academician of Science in Finland
- 1999 Member of the American Philosophical Society
Images for kids
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W. D. Hamilton, a leading evolutionary biologist.
See also
In Spanish: William Donald Hamilton para niños
