Abstract
Price's equation provides a very simple—and very general—encapsulation of evolutionary change. It forms the mathematical foundations of several topics in evolutionary biology, and has also been applied outwith evolutionary biology to a wide range of other scientific disciplines. However, the equation's combination of simplicity and generality has led to a number of misapprehensions as to what it is saying and how it is supposed to be used. Here, I give a simple account of what Price's equation is, how it is derived, what it is saying and why this is useful. In particular, I suggest that Price's equation is useful not primarily as a predictor of evolutionary change but because it provides a general theory of selection. As an illustration, I discuss some of the insights Price's equation has brought to the study of social evolution.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Fifty years of the Price equation’.
Highlights
Some authors have interpreted it as meaning that Price’s equation assumes linearity or additivity, and that it is liable to give incorrect results in the context of more complex relationships between genes, phenotypes and fitness. This is incorrect; Price’s equation is instead showing that natural selection only cares about additive effects: irrespective of the goodness of the least-squares straight-line fit, the product of the slope of this straight line and the heritable variance correctly describes the action of 4 natural selection
I have argued that its primary usefulness is in providing a general theory of selection, by isolating the Darwinian portion of evolution from the rest of evolutionary change
Darwin’s theory of natural selection was inspired by Malthus’s view that the intrinsic multiplicative nature of biological reproduction inevitably leads to intense competition for limiting resources, such that the growth of one lineage or population tends to impact negatively upon the growth of its competitors, and this resource competition has often been seen as a defining feature of natural selection
Summary
Price (1922–1975) was a restless, obsessive thinker His eclectic career saw him working as a chemist on the Manhattan Project and at Bell Laboratories, writing about economics and extra-sensory perception as a science journalist, developing mainframe computing at IBM, pursuing evolutionary theory at the Galton Laboratory, undertaking biblical exegesis in relation to the Easter story and becoming consumed by fundamentalist Christianity— before his life was tragically cut short by suicide [1,2,3]. I will provide a concrete illustration of the conceptual usefulness of Price’s equation by considering some of the insights it has brought to the study of social evolution
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