A battle is being waged over kin and kind: Did cooperation evolve in humans and other animals because it helped relatives? Or because it promoted group living? A school of thought known as inclusive ...

The dominant evolutionary theory for Earth's most successful creatures, and a proposed influence on human altruism, is under attack. For decades, selflessness -- as exhibited in eusocial insect ...

A furor has broken out among biologists over ant specialist E.O. Wilson’s latest attack on a concept used to explain the origins of self-sacrifice in the dog-eat-dog world of evolution. The debate ...

Researchers have used several different ways of testing Hamilton's rule, the core mathematical formula of kin selection, as an explanation for the evolution of much altruistic behavior in animals.

More like mom or dad? Human babies always get this curious look in their faces combined with the question of whom the child resembles most. The answers vary depending on the degree of kinship, gender ...

In 1975 Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson published Sociobiology, perhaps the most powerful refinement of evolutionary theory since On the Origin of Species. Darwin’s theory of natural selection ...

Understanding the maintenance of cooperation is of fundamental importance in evolutionary biology. Kin selection is a powerful mechanism that explains altruism (Hamilton, 1964), the principle being ...

Evolutionary game theory is a general mathematical framework that describes the evolution of social traits. This framework forms the basis of many multilevel selection models and is also frequently ...

Kin selection occurs when phenotypic variation in a character or set of characters is heritable, spatially structured, and has differential fitness effects on neighboring individuals. Spatially ...

I promised I'd go over the recent PNAS paper, Group selection and kin selection: Two concepts but one process. This is one of those articles where most of the heavy lifting is in the technical ...