To: Jeffrey Epsteinijeevacationggmail.com]
From: Martin Nowak
Sent Wed 9/15/2010 9:46:17 PM
Subject Fwd: phone number

i had such a good conversation with trivers!!!

Begin forwarded message:

From:
Date: September 15 2010 11:52:38 AM E T
To: "Marlin Nowak"
Subject: phone num er

dear martin

thanks for your generous letter, i was very happy to get it

i would be delighted to talk to you anytime

my home phone is

alas, having lost my cell, at the moment it is the only number i have and often goes straight to voice mail before i can grab it--if so, please leave a call-back number

BTW i taught your paper yesterday at a genetics journal club here and one minor point i thought i would mention

it is SLIGHTLY preferable, in my opinion, to define R as the conditional probability that a gene found in me is found in you by direct descent from a common ancestor

rather than fraction of genes shared between us by direct descent; main problem with the latter is that it tempts people into a certain kind of mistake, e.g. in the 70s and early 80s, you had people say that exactly half our genes are found in each child but there is variance around 50% for full sibs, due to the vagaries of recombination; then they argued we should evolve to be sensitive to such variance, which alas does not follow--any gene that attempted this would still itself be found with probability of 1/2 in the other, hence no benefit to responding to higher fractional similarity at loci elsewhere

if it measures itself, we are back to a selfish "green beard" gene, which the rest of the genome will then oppose

i look forward to hearing from you

all the best

robert