I'm shall assume most of you reading this post are familiar with the concept of Kin Selection and save you a repeat explanation, no doubt Google will satisfy the curiousity of those of you who don't already know.
Traditionally, Kin Selection has been offered only as an explaination for alturism 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 alturism among related individuals to be applied more generally to the population at large? If not, why not?
One for Biological Evolution, please.
This message has been edited by Admin, 11-07-2005 09:11 AM
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