kin selection and culture

Kin Selection

Kin selection

How can individuals calculate relatedness? They generally don’t need to, any more than a bird needs to calculate aerodynamic forces to fly. If, under certain conditions, performing a behavior satisfies Hamilton’s rule, then the action is favored. The triggering conditions may include cues to relatedness, which are usually based on social experience. A bee, for example, learns the smell of her b...

Kin Selection and Its Critics

Hamilton’s theory of kin selection is the best-known framework for understanding the evolution of social behavior but has long been a source of controversy in evolutionary biology. A recent critique of the theory by Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson sparked a new round of debate, which shows no signs of abating. In this overview, we highlight a number of conceptual issues that lie at the heart of the ...

Kin Selection and Cooperating Agents

Kin selection is a theory that attempts to explain the apparently altruistic behaviour in nature. It suggests that self-sacriice in order to save kin is understandable through consideration of the probabilities of occurrence of an individual's genes in its close relatives. Thus altruism can be explained without recourse tògroup selection'. However, on closer inspection , it would appear that ma...

Kin-Selection: The Rise and Fall of Kin-Cheaters

We demonstrate the existence of altruism via kin selection in artificial life and explore its nuances. We do so in the Avida system through a setup that is based on the behavior of colicinogenic bacteria: Organisms can kill unrelated organisms in a given radius but must kill themselves to do so. Initially, we confirm results found in the bacterial world: Digital organisms do sacrifice themselve...