The inclusive fitness controversy: finding a way forward

This paper attempts to reconcile critics and defenders of inclusive fitness by constructing a synthesis that does justice to the insights of both. I argue that criticisms of the regression-based version of Hamilton's rule, although they undermine its use for predictive purposes, do not undermine its use as an organizing framework for social evolution research. I argue that the assumptions underlying the concept of inclusive fitness, conceived as a causal property of an individual organism, are unlikely to be exactly true in real populations, but they are approximately true given a specific type of weak selection that Hamilton took, on independent grounds, to be responsible for the cumulative assembly of complex adaptation. Finally, I reflect on the uses and limitations of ‘design thinking’ in social evolution research.

The Ontology of Interactive Kinds

This paper defends the notions of an interactive kind and a looping effect as features of social and human scientific classifications and aims to give a realist interpretation of them. I argue that interactive kinds can best be modeled as a special case of changing causal property cluster kinds. In order to do so, I develop a typology of looping effects according to the sort of entities that are affected, the main types of which are individual-looping, category-looping, and kind-looping. Based on this distinction, I identify interactive kinds as those causal property cluster kinds that are subjected to kind-looping.

NUMERICAL STUDY OF THE INTERACTION BETWEEN POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE MASS OBJECTS IN GENERAL RELATIVITY

Based on Baumgarte–Shapiro–Shibata–Nakamura formalism and moving puncture method, we demonstrate the first numerical evolutions of the interaction between positive and negative mass objects. Using the causal property of general relativity, we set our computational domain around the positive mass black hole while excluding the region around the naked singularity introduced by the negative mass object. Besides the usual Sommerfeld numerical boundary condition, an approximate boundary condition is proposed for this nonasymptotically-flat computational domain. Careful checks show that either boundary condition introduces smaller error than the numerical truncation errors. This is consistent with the causal property of general relativity. Except for the numerical truncation error and round-off error, our method gives an exact solution to the full Einstein's equation for a portion of spacetime with two objects whose masses have opposite signs. So our method opens the door for numerical explorations with negative mass objects. Based on this method, we investigate the Newtonian limit of spacetime with two objects whose masses have opposite sign. Our result implies that this spacetime does have a Newtonian limit which corresponds to a negative mass particle chasing a positive mass particle. This result sheds some light on an interesting debate about the Newtonian limit of a spacetime with positive and negative point masses.

Generalized retarded products

The generalization of the retarded commutator previously introduced (Polkinghorne 1957 b ) is discussed. A proof of its causal property is given and a new proof of its relation to S -matrix elements is given. This latter provides a generalization of the work of Lehmann, Symanzik & Zimmermann (1957).