The narrow road taken

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Evolutionary behavioural science is not blessed with opportunities for concrete discoveries – a new planet, or the shape of a potentially interesting molecule, for example. Its empirical advance is driven instead by new ideas, and the 1960s and 1970s saw a revolution in the theoretical armoury of those working on the evolution of behaviour. Optimality theory, borrowed from economics, provided tools for testing the adaptiveness of non-social behaviour, and John Maynard Smith showed that to understand the evolution of social behaviours stable, rather than optimal, solutions must be sought. These methods helped to drag evolutionary thinking away from a naive species level, group selectionist, viewpoint and back to the individual and the gene as the units of importance. Crucially at stake here was the understanding of altruism and it was W. D. Hamilton who put the gene centre stage as the unit of selection with the concept of inclusive fitness, and who showed how to analyse the evolution of interactions between relatives. The concept of inclusive fitness was Hamilton’s greatest achievement but he went on to make a number of strikingly original contributions to evolutionary biology before his untimely death in 2000 at the age of 63. In her biography Ullica Segerstrale gives us both the man and his work. With sympathy and intelligence she seeks to understand how his evolutionary and genetic approaches to altruism, and other questions of pressing human concern, arose from his own personality and world view. Her account is enriched by letters to family and friends, and Hamilton’s own commentary on his work as published in his collected papers, Narrow Roads of Gene Land. William Donald Hamilton was born in Cairo in 1936, of New Zealand parents, and grew up in Kent, not far from Darwin’s home, the second oldest of six children. He was a passionate naturalist from a young age, with an interest both