Hamilton and others did not pluck the idea of parasites and sex from thin air. They are the beneficiaries of three separate lines of research that have only now converged. The first was the discovery that parasites can control populations and cause them to go in cycles. This was hinted at by Alfred Lotka and Vito Volterra in the 1920s and fleshed out by Robert May and Roy Anderson in London in the 1970s. The second was the discovery by J. B. S. Haldane and others in the 1940s of abundant polymorphism, the curious phenomenon that for almost every gene there seemed to be several different
...more
