Question

EVOLUTION

1. The biologist J.B.S. Haldane was once explaining kin selection to some friends in a pub.  As the story goes, he scribbled some calculations on an envelope and announced that he would be willing to die for two brothers or eight cousins. Explain his reasoning.

Answer 1

Haldane’s graduate student John Maynard Smith (1920-2004), who was either there or told the story by Haldane, Haldane was with some other of is graduate students at a London pub called The Orange Tree, working on the mathematics of kin selection, during which time Haldane, who had been calculating on the back of an envelope for some minutes, suddenly sprang up and announced the following humorous conclusion, deduced from his calculations:
“I would gladly die for two brothers or eight cousins.”

The basic premise here, being that because siblings are on average 50% identical by descent, nephews 25%, and cousins 12.5%, that, owing to the Darwinian paradigm of survival of the fittest, with its inherent supposed overarching aim to pass on one’s genes, that human kin lives can be equated as follows:

1 person = 8 cousins (12.5x8=100).

1 person = 4 nephews (4x25=100).

1 person = 2 brothers (2x50=100)