Spiteful Behaviour
In his 1970 paper Selfish and Spiteful Behaviour in an Evolutionary Model Hamilton considers the question of whether harm inflicted upon an organism must inevitably be a byproduct of adaptations for survival. What of possible cases where an organism is deliberately harming others without apparent benefit to the self? Such behaviour Hamilton calls spiteful. It can be explained as the increase in the chance of an organism's genetic alleles to be passed to the next generations by harming those that are less closely related than relationship by chance.
Spite, however, is unlikely ever to be elaborated into any complex forms of adaptation. Targets of aggression are likely to act in revenge, and the majority of pairs of individuals (assuming a panmictic species) exhibit a roughly average level of genetic relatedness, making the selection of targets of spite problematic.
Read more about this topic: W. D. Hamilton
Famous quotes containing the words spiteful and/or behaviour:
“Well, I never would have believed that grown up men could behave like spiteful little schoolboys. Have I said something to annoy you? Then I forget, anything reasonable annoys you.”
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“I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility—I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.”
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