W. D. Hamilton - Early Life

Early Life

Hamilton was born in 1936 in Cairo, Egypt, the second of seven children. His father A. M. Hamilton was a New Zealand-born engineer. His mother B. M. Hamilton was a medical doctor, also from New Zealand.

The Hamilton family settled in Kent. During the Second World War, the young Hamilton was evacuated to Edinburgh. He had an interest in natural history from an early age and would spend his spare time collecting butterflies and other insects. In 1946 he discovered E.B. Ford's New Naturalist book Butterflies, which introduced him to the principles of evolution by natural selection, genetics and population genetics.

He was educated at Tonbridge School, where he was in Smythe House. As a 12-year old he was seriously injured while playing with explosives his father had. These were left over from his making hand grenades for the Home Guard during World War II; the accident might have killed him if his mother had not been a doctor. The boy had to have a thoracotomy in King's College Hospital to save his life, but fingers on his right hand had to be amputated and he was left with scarring on his body. He needed six months to recover.

Hamilton stayed on an extra term at Tonbridge to complete the Cambridge entrance examinations, and then travelled in France. He completed two years of national service. As an undergraduate at St. John's College, he was uninspired by the "many biologists hardly seemed to believe in evolution". He was intrigued by Ronald Fisher's book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection; but Fisher lacked standing at Cambridge as he was viewed as only a statistician. Hamilton was excited by Fisher's chapters on eugenics. In earlier chapters, Fisher provided a mathematical basis for the genetics of evolution. Working through the stodgy prose, Hamilton later blamed Fisher's book for his getting only a 2:1 degree.