Segerstrale celebrates 50 years of inclusive fitness in South America

• Celebratory Hamilton display, HBES, Natal, Brazil
• Keynote address “Science as Adventure”, ISHE, Belem, Brazil
• Poster talk with Brazilian researchers, ISHE, Belem
• The root of it all.
• Exploring river islands

Professor of Sociology Ullica Segerstrale was invited to South America this summer for three academic conferences, at which she presented on the work of the late theoretical biologist William D. Hamilton.

This year marks the 50-year anniversary of Hamilton’s pioneering explanation of the evolutionary basis of altruistic behavior – or, as Segerstrale puts it, “looking at [altruistic behavior] from the ‘gene’s’ point of view.” His revolutionary concept was that of ‘inclusive fitness’, which takes into account the fact that an individual’s genes also are represented in its relatives, Segerstrale says.

Segerstrale is the author of Nature’s Oracle: The Life and Work of W.D. Hamilton, an intellectual biography published in 2013 by Oxford University Press.

“I got a Guggenheim fellowship to write this biography – I became suddenly a humanist as well,” Segerstrale says.

“It is interesting to follow his view – what was it that made him so obsessed with altruism – because the real muse was this altruism,” she says.

Segerstrale’s travels began with a trip to a conference of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, held in early August in the city of Natal, Brazil. She then traveled on to the XXII Biennial Conference of the International Society for Human Ethology in Belem, Brazil, near the Amazon. Finally, in late August, she traveled to Argentina to the conference of the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

“Hamilton started a whole paradigm shift in science. It was now possible to make predictive mathematical models and then see if they worked. He provided the theory,” Segerstrale says. “This then triggered interest in human behavior – he became the first president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.”

“This is now 50 years since his path-breaking paper in 1964, having to do with how to formalize the evolution of social behavior in a mathematical way. His scientific colleagues all over the world felt he should be celebrated, and that it’s important because people are still doing science this way.”

In the case of all three international conferences, it was the first time they were held in South America.

According to Segerstrale, there is some difference in emphasis between the two societies dealing with human behavior. Human Behavior and Evolution Society is more connected to the field of Evolutionary Psychology (a spinoff of sociobiology), she says, while ethology is the study of human behavior – specifically “universal patterns of behavior across all societies.”

“If you look for human universal behaviors, you look at how far you can push it back to human origins,” she says. But Segerstrale also says the interests of the societies are increasingly overlapping.

At the Human Behavior and Evolution Society’s conference, Segerstrale gave the introductory plenary lecture, “Homage to Bill Hamilton,” along with Jon Seger, whose presentation focused on Hamilton’s scientific contributions, while Segerstrale’s focused on Hamilton as “someone who deeply understood nature.” The title of her talk was “Reading Nature’s Mind”. There was also a testimony by one of Hamilton’s Brazilian Ph.D. students, Carlos Fonseca, which Segerstrale was moved by.

“We complemented each other marvelously in our papers,” Segerstrale says. “For me it was very rewarding.”

Segerstrale felt the audience appreciated the presentations, too.

Later, at the International Society for Human Ethology’s conference, Segerstrale served as the keynote speaker.

“That was an extreme honor,” she says.

In her keynote, she focused in particular on Hamilton’s travel in Brazil.

“He got a lot of ideas there, and he contributed to the development of ecological research in Brazil. There is a research station in the Amazon that has his name,” she says. “He saw himself passionately as an explorer.”

Among his interests, Hamilton was studying the genetics of plants. He was concerned with the preservation of the Amazon, “which is flooded half the year, and is an unusual habitat in the world,” Segerstrale explained.

“Being in that Amazonian environment, I personally could connect up with the book I had already written about Hamilton and with [his] feeling for the nature,” Segerstrale says.

Segerstrale’s final trip was to Argentina, to present at the conference of the Society for the Social Studies of Science.

“I gave a regular invited paper in the section about the psychology of science,” she says, which was titled “Emotion As a Driver of Science.”

“I took Hamilton as a case study of a scientist’s reaction to the whole scientific system–for example his reactions when his papers were rejected,” she says. “He was before his time. The system was not ready to catch such people.”

“Unusual talent is more freedom-oriented. What do we do to pick up innovators?” she says.

Segerstrale says she got great personal satisfaction out of having the opportunity to share her work on Hamilton at the three conferences.

“I wanted them to know about him and his love for Brazil and the Amazon,” she says. “There was a lot of interest in Hamilton and a lot of interest in my book, which was very gratifying. And I think he would have liked it.”