1. Natalie Angier, who wrote the Hamilton obituary, refers to "inclusive fitness, also known as kin selection." Kin selection is a process. Inclusive fitness is a quantitative variable. Saying "inclusive fitness, also known as kin selection" is roughly like saying "wealth, also known as capitalism."

2. Angier writes, "Dr. Hamilton proposed an elegant and mathematically sophisticated way of understanding altruistic behavior, a problem that had baffled naturalists from Darwin onward. … Why, for example, do worker bees forsake the opportunity to breed in favor of caring for the queen's young?" Actually, Charles Darwin did, in The Origin of Species, solve the puzzle of sterile castes in insects. In fact, as Hamilton once acknowledged in conversation with me, Darwin here showed that he got the basic idea of kin selection. It's just that Darwin's theory wasn't general (he doesn't seem to have seen its application to the general question of altruism among kin in non-insect species), and Darwin's theory wasn't rigorous (it couldn't be, because Darwin didn't know about genes). That it was another century before anyone turned Darwin's insight into a general and rigorous theory is a tribute both to Darwin and to the man who finally did it. Click here for elaboration on Darwin's pre-genetics version of kin selection.