Natural Reward Podcast
Natural Reward Podcast
Latest Episodes
Natural Reward’s Struggle to Exist: How a New Theory First Entered a Hostile Scientific World
I. What does it take for a new scientific theory to come into existence?Before a theory can spread, it must first emerge. It must be invented, named, clarified, defended, revised, and forced into a form that can survive public scr...
Hamilton’s Rule and Inclusive Fitness, Part I: What Did Hamilton (1964) Actually Define?
KeywordsInclusive fitness, Hamilton’s rule, kin selection, altruism, social evolution, population genetics, gene substitution, Fisher’s average effect, relatedness, evolution of cooperation, greenbeard effect, dominance, allele frequency...
Composite-trait evolution in pitcher plants: Ulrike Bauer
Ulrike Bauer discusses the evolution and diversity of pitcher plants, focusing on the spring trapping mechanism found in some species. Pitcher plants are carnivorous plants that capture insects in a fluid-filled cavity. They have evolved indepe...
Using Drones and AI to Find Illegal Dumping Sites: Interview with Brian Johnson
Illegal dumping is a widespread problem in cities throughout the world and differentially affects disadvantaged neighborhoods. Brian Johnson is a software engineer who moved to San Francisco nearly a decade ago. At the time, Brian could a...
Supplement to "Updating the Software of Social Evolution"
In this episode, Jon and I discuss some of the background to the previous episode. We discuss generalized versions of Hamilton's rule, Fisher's fundamental theorem, and Wright's fitness maximization formula. W. D. Hamilton used Sewall Wright's ...