In an article to be published in the January issue of BioScience, two philosophers tackle one of the most divisive arguments in modern biology: the value of the theory of "kin selection." Kin ...

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 ...

Last week Sarah Jane explained the evolutionary advantage of helping out family members, an idea known as kin selection. While the benefits are clear, we don't know how kin selection initially evolves ...

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.

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 ...

SALT LAKE CITY, June 15, 2016 - It's easy to understand why natural selection favors people who help close kin at their own expense: It can increase the odds the family's genes are passed to future ...

Extending her initial studies of social wasps, Mary Jane West-Eberhard has spent her career probing the evolutionary relationship between social behavior and developmental flexibility. Researchers ...

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 ...