Abstract
A number of recent discussions have argued that George Price's equationfor representing evolutionary change is a powerful and illuminatingtool, especially in the context of debates about multiple levels ofselection. Our paper dissects Price's equation in detail, and comparesit to another statistical tool: the calculation and comparison ofaverage fitnesses. The relations between Price's equation and equationsfor evolutionary change using average fitness are closer than issometimes supposed. The two approaches achieve a similar kind ofstatistical summary of one generation of change, and they achieve thisvia a similar loss of information about the underlying fitnessstructure.
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Kerr, B., Godfrey-Smith, P. On Price's Equation and Average Fitness. Biology & Philosophy 17, 551–565 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020572704223
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020572704223