William D. Hamilton was wrong

Last week I reviewed some seminal early papers of the evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton. Hamilton was arguably the most accomplished theoretical biologist of the second half of the 20th century; Richard Dawkins referred to him as the most "...distinguished Darwinian since Darwin." My review of the papers I selected from Narrow Roads of Gene Land I allowed me to reacquaint myself with his prose style after a few years away, and as it came on the heals of my reviews of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory I could not help but note contrasts.

On occasion Hamilton veers into such abstruse density and syntactical eccentricity that I had a hard time following him. In this way he seems to resemble R. A. Fisher, who could cram a great many ideas into a few sentences through a sly utilization of the flexibility of the English language. But this economy came at the price of easy comprehension, and resulted in a a tendency to hear a slightly different story upon each rereading. This is where their mathematical expositions could clear up the confusions; in practice math is often meant to impress rather than illuminate, but when coupled with substantive prose its complementary role is clear. I would not characterize Gould as a particularly obscure writer, though his lexicon plumbs the depths of possibility, and his narrative often tacks back and forth, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory showcases the author's well known literary flourish. Though I've griped about the banality of Gould's argument, I don't generally have any problem racing through the text, the prose flies by fast. In contrast reading some of Hamilton's papers required a great deal of close reading, and repeated perusal. This is not to say that his prose was necessarily aiming for opacity, but the interlocking contingency of his ideas meant that it was critical to comprehend accurately the gist of Hamilton's thoughts. Gould's opus has so far consisted of an enormous number of circumlocutions around the general thesis that he is promoting.

The relative vagueness and banality of Gould's argument leaves me apathetic at this point. As I've stated I'm still in the section of the work which is historically focused, and I've made it clear that I'm not reading The Structure of Evolutionary Theory to learn history of science. A proper evaluation has to wait until I finish the entire book. Nevertheless, I can say that on many occasions I believe that Hamilton got things wrong. Though it can be difficult to extract meaning on a quick read through, a close examination of the text and an inspection of the formal presentation make the points rather clear. Hypotheses are meant to be falsified or verified, and so it is with the arguments that Hamilton presents. Throughout The Structure of Evolutionary Theory Stephen Jay Gould is concerned with the frequency of different evolutionary parameters over the course of time, but at no time does he say something precise such as 20% frequency, rather, the terminology is vague. It may be that the that is simply the nature of the beast, but in the end I appreciate science which is amenable to easy falsification because it stakes out its ground plainly. Euclid's Elements and the Hebrew Bible are still relevant after 2,000 years, but only the latter is subject to exegesis.