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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 78, No. 7, [Part 2: Biological Sciences] (Jul., 1981), pp. 4440-4443 (4 pages) The altruistic-gene theory of kin ...

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 ...

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 ...

New research shows that family ties and traits such as manipulation, sacrifice and selflessness are just as key to survival in parasitic organisms as they are in cognitive species like humans. In ...