Human kin detection

2030’s Seniors : Kin and Step-Kin

Demographic computer microsimulation is applied to produce projections of numbers and distributions of close kin for the U.S. elderly of 2030. This paper reports results for the non-black population, with special emphasis on the numbers and possible roles of step-kin. The projections indicate that the elderly of 2030 are likely to be moderately deprived in terms of numbers of close living biolo...

Semantic Sequence Kin: A Method of Document Copy Detection

The string matching and global word frequency model are two basic models of Document Copy Detection, although they are both unsatisfied in some respects. The String Kernel (SK) and Word Sequence Kernel (WSK) may map string pairs into a new feature space directly, in which the data is linearly separable. This idea inspires us with the Semantic Sequence Kin (SSK) and we apply it to document copy ...

Kin Selection

Lateralization of kin recognition signals in the human face.

When human subjects view photographs of faces, their judgments of identity, gender, emotion, age, and attractiveness depend more on one side of the face than the other. We report an experiment testing whether allocentric kin recognition (the ability to judge the degree of kinship between individuals other than the observer) is also lateralized. One hundred and twenty-four observers judged wheth...

Human kin recognition is self- rather than family-referential.

Inclusive fitness theory predicts that organisms will tend to help close kin more than less related individuals. In a variety of birds and mammals, relatives are recognized by comparing their phenotype to an internal representation or template, which might be learned through either repeated exposure to family members or self-inspection. Mirrors are ubiquitous now, but were absent during our evo...