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Hello, and welcome to KinSelection.com. This is a site dedicated to reinterpreting
standard notions of natural selection(specifically Behavioral Ecology). Kin selection
needs to be re-examined in order to fully describe relationships between individuals in groups. Through examinations of examples in the animal kingdom, we can clearly articulate the mechanisms in process that contribute to evolution, via natural selection.
Group Selection - What's it all about?
There are various trends in contemporary Anthropological thought that are aimed at understanding social interaction between members of a similar lineage. The vast majority of the research is based upon genetic markers of relatedness. There are formulas that can be used to determine an 'R' factor of relatedness. This rubric for determining relatedness can offer some very poignant insight into why animals would be interested in pursuing seemingly altruistic behaviors. Those animals that share a high factor of relatedness are generally more apt to care for one another than individuals who lack this genetic similarity. I propose that the actual mechanisms that animals use to determine relatedness relies of phenotypic variation as opposed to genotypic variation. The ramifications of this slight change will dramatically alter our perception of how individuals asses relatedness between one another.
Animals do not use the same tools as humans in determining relatedness. Through advanced scientific techniques such as protein electrophoresis, we can look at genetic code to infer relatedness. This process is mimicked nowhere in nature. Animals do not have the technological sophistication to view and interpret genetic code, and are limited in their ability to determine kin by their sensory palette. Through such senses as sight, sound, smell, touch and taste, individuals observe the variation within populations in order to asses traits which are, in turn, used to make judgments of relatedness. Phenotype recognition is the process individuals use in order to determine relatedness and kin.
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