Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Altruism and self-interest — whether and how action can aim at another’s good rather than one’s own — psychological egoism and its rivals, the empathy–altruism debate and self–other merging, inclusion of others in the self and identity fusion, team reasoning and group-directed preferences, identity in the utility function, the evolution of unselfish behaviour (kin, reciprocal and group selection), and the extent of the self as it bears on what counts as self-interest (ADR-062).
2 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-655 v3 | Social behaviour evolves as if each individual valued a neighbour’s fitness against its own by their coefficient of relationship, and its discriminations evolve to make that coefficient determinate; so kin are favoured and strangers met with hostility, relatives fight less, and haplodiploid sisters, related by 3/4, are predisposed to worker altruism | Hamilton (1964), Part II, LIT-506, read in full in NOTE-410, on Part I’s model (LIT-497). Two general principles, offered as an “unrigorous” generalization, are applied to alarm calls, kin recognition in gulls and terns, clones and colonies, Hymenoptera, and fights. The evidence is anecdotal. The author calls his positive indications for distant relatives “rather few and feeble”, reports Australian halictines and multiple mating as running against the hymenopteran hypothesis, and explains anomalies case by case. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1351 | In West, Fisher, Gardner and Kiers’s account, a transition in individuality is defined by two separable conditions, mutual dependence (parts that once replicated alone can replicate only within the larger unit) and negligible within-group conflict, and proceeds by forming a cooperative group and then transforming it, with no clear border between the steps; across transitions what explains them is an ecological benefit to cooperation together with group formation that unites the members’ interests (clonal bottlenecks, lifetime monogamy, vertical transmission of clonal symbionts), while kin discrimination and the repression of competition played relatively minor roles | West et al. (2015), LIT-2003, read in NOTE-1538. A colloquium review: the definition and the two steps are the authors’ framework, and the explanatory claim is drawn from the comparative literature they cite. Proposed because they call it “tentative”, and because the theory for transitions between species is missing on their own account. It differs from THEORY-141 on mechanism: group formation, not policing, does the work. | Proposed |