So, after a period, here is the next thread. Many of you have heard of Richard Dawkins and 'The Selfish Gene'. Dawkins plays an important role here. While Dawkins has won justified fame for his work, he built upon the work done by William Hamilton. https://twitter.com/ClimbhiKc/status/1281888946876641282

The idea of selfish genes can be traced back to Hamilton's first paper, 'The Genetic Evolution of Social Behaviour' written in 1963. The basis of this was Hamilton's efforts to seek answers to the evolution of sterile worker castes in . The 'Selfish Gene' develops the ideas...

proposed by Hamilton and John Maynard Smith. Incidentally, Dawkins was a student of Niko Tinbergen, who shared a Nobel Prize with ethologist Konrad Lorenz and Karl Von Frisch. Dawkins aim was to show what was wrong with 'group selection'.

For Dawkins, the unit of replication was the gene and he saw genes as the unit that spread. Now, if genes want to spread, do they "make use of bodies?" It is from here that the whole question of cultural determinism Vs genetic determinism comes.

However, there were claims made to link human behaviour to genetic reasons. Sociobiology, a book by entomologist Edward O Wilson, was published in 1975. There was opposition. The debate veers around the degree to which genes and environment (culture) shape human behaviour.

However, there is a general consensus that the actual effects of a gene or phenotypic effect depended on the environment, its interaction with other genes. "Meaningless to speak of an absolute context-free, phenotypic effect of a given gene."

The debate over whether humans are blank slates, or pre-fixed templates that can only be stretched to a limit is still being held. Or to put it simplistically, Cultural determinism Vs Genetic determinism.

This whole debate continued even when the field of study evolutionary psychology came up.
The premise is that a lot of our present day behaviour owes to to the fact that we evolved in societies like stone age tribes.

This is the End of this thread. Those more interested, can Google:
1. Emergence of altruism
2. Kin selection
3. Reciprocal altruism
4. Napoleon Chagnon
5. Marvin Harris
I'll do a final thread and wrap this up.
END