What is the significance of kin selection?

Kin selection is important because it can explain altruistic behavior, such as in workers of the social insects. However, it can also explain selfish behaviors and is important for understanding conflicts between individuals.

How is kin selection different from reciprocal altruism?

The main difference between kin selection and reciprocal altruism is that kin selection favors the reproductive success of the other relatives even at a cost to the organism’s own survival and reproduction. Furthermore, kin selection uses shared genes, while reciprocal altruism does not use shared genes.

What is the power of kin selection theory?

The true power of kin selection theory is its generality: kin selection can help explain a huge range of social interactions and not just altruistic cooperation. The simplest cases are when interacting individuals are more closely related, they should be more likely to cooperate, show more selfish restraint, and show less aggression.

How does kin selection affect altruistic behavior?

Kin selection requires and is based on genetic relatedness between the donor and the recipient of the altruistic act. Kin selection is the dominant explanation for the evolution of aid-giving behavior. The other explanations are interesting and important, but are restricted to more limited circumstances.

What is inclusive fitness in kin selection?

Kin selection theory states that the fitness of A is best measured as inclusive fitness – this reflects the genetic effects of survival and reproduction both on actor A itself, and on the recipients, R1 to Rn, multiplied by the genetic relatedness between actor and recipients. In general, inclusive fitness of actor A can be expressed as

What is the coefficient of relatedness between cousins?

In diploid organisms, every parent (top row) transmits 50\% of its genetic information to each offspring (middle row). On the average, siblings therefore share half of each parent’s contribution to their genome, adding to a coefficient of relatedness r = 0.5. Consequently, cousins share an r = 0.125 or r = 1/8 (bottom row).