Kin Selection & Altruism

I'm shall assume most of you reading this post are familiar with the concept of
Kin Selection and save you a repeat explanation.Traditionally, Kin Selection has been offered only as an explaination for altruism among closely related members and then more generalised applications of Game Theory are brought in to explain it outside of family groups. It seems to me that this is an error brought out by the typical usage of "genetic similarity". We typically talk about a child as sharing 50% of its genetic material with its parents, yet this is not the case, in fact you share roughly 99.9% of your genetic with every other living human being (according to recent data on the subject).Can not this common section of genetic code allow the same principles as allow for the explanation of altruism among related individuals to be applied more generally to the population at large? If not, why not?Edit: corrected the formatting after the admins added the Kin Selection linkThis message has been edited by Mr Jack, 11-07-2005 10:08 AM

Yes, I pondered this myself.

I've thought some more.Kin Selection should "fix" in the population. While, initially, the kin selection will only have selfish self-propogation driving it forward that effect should quickly drive it into a position of largely total coverage. Once we've reached this point, imagine we have a new mutant who's kin selection is, for whatever reason, shot. Now the mutant's children (who are the only ones carrying the new gene) will be less likely to survive than those around them who carry the kin selection genes because they're not benefiting from the additional help of those around them who are closely related to them.Make sense?

I've just answered my own question, haven't I?

No, I wasn't. I was refering specifically to Kin Selection Alturism where individuals behave more alturistically towards their own Kin only. In this case those who's genes lead them to either not display this alturism or distribute their alturism without respect to kinship will be at a selective disadvantage against those with the Kin Selection genes because they will not be receiving the same level of alturism from their Kin (who share their genes), or expending more heavily on alturism.

I didn't define it. I imagine the definition: an act performed that benefits another but has no immediate benefit for the individual acting is sufficent for our purposes.

I'm specifically not talking about reciprocity.I don't believe in "True Alturism".