Plants often compete with closely related individuals due to limited dispersal, leading to two commonly invoked predictions on competitive outcomes. Kin selection, from evolutionary theory, predicts that competition between relatives will likely be weaker. The niche partitioning hypothesis, from ecological theory, predicts that competition between close relatives will likely be stronger. We tes...

Thanks to next generation sequencing (NGS), we can now access ancient biological relationships, including ancestry and parentage, with a startling level of clarity. This has led recentering kinship within archaeological discourse. In this paper, argue that blood biology are key elements kin-making only in so far as they contextualized made sense through social relations. We the conceptions unde...

1. Sharing recent ancestry (kinship) increases the degree of genetic similarity between individuals, where genetic similarity could mean anything from sharing a particular allele to sharing an entire genome. 2. Genetic similarity can influence behavioural and other responses between individuals in a number of ways, discriminatory and non-discriminatory. All are likely to result in kin bias, bec...

Fertility decline is still a puzzle. A recent body of work has suggested that changes in kin networks may help explain changing reproductive behaviour. As countries modernise, kin networks break down and association with non-relatives becomes more common. This reduces both the practical support available to mothers in raising children, and affects reproductive norms. This paper presents the res...

In many cooperatively breeding vertebrates, a dominant breeding pair is assisted in offspring care by nonbreeding helpers. A leading explanation for this altruistic behavior is Hamilton's idea that helpers gain indirect fitness benefits by rearing relatives (kin selection). Many studies have shown that helpers typically provide care for relatives, but relatively few have shown that helpers prov...

2008 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am greatly indebted to Dr. Sung Wing-Kin for being my supervisor in this project. He has been unyielding in providing me with guidance and inspiration. Our many invaluable discussions helped me significantly to navigate through the research process. I extend my utmost gratitude for his constant encouragement and support. Karuturi Radha Krishna Murthy for the many great...

Despite widespread interest in kin selection and nepotism, relatively little is known about the perceptual abilities of animals to recognize their relatives. Here I show that a highly nepotistic species, Belding's ground squirrels (Spermophilus beldingi), produces odours from at least two sources that correlate with relatedness ('kin labels'), and that ground squirrels can use these odours to m...

Aim and Objectives: To increase the understanding of next of kin’s life situation in the context of supporting persons who are long term ill, disabled and/or older by describing their experienced burden and quality of life and also the relationship between QoL, burden and socioeconomic variables. Methods: Cross-sectional, descriptive and correlative design. Eighty-four next of kin answered two ...