ReviewProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
The evolution of altruism and the serial rediscovery of the role of relatedness.
Review in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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35 citing papers in PubMed, 107 citations in OpenAlex.
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- The general version of Hamilton's rule.eLife · 2025Article
- Distinct oxytocin signaling pathways synergistically mediate rescue-like behavior in mice.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
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- Is provisioning rate of parents and helpers influenced by the simulated presence of novel individuals?Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2025Article
- Tending the sick: Observations of epimeletic behavior in humpback whales towards conspecifics during entanglement events.PloS one · 2025Article
- Optimal conditions, experimentation and drug testing.Lab animal · 2024Article
- Empirically testing a relationship between cooperation and the prime numbers.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Do They Know What They Are Doing? Cognitive Aspects of Rescue Behaviour Directed by Workers of the Red Wood AntLife (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- The Impact of the Macroeconomic Environment on Social Preferences: Evidence from the Global Preference Survey.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Fifty shades of greenbeard: robust evolution of altruism based on similarity of complex phenotypes.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The role of the ecological scaffold in the origin and maintenance of whole-group trait altruism in microbial populations.BMC ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Reproductive variance can drive behavioral dynamics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Punishment in the public goods game is evaluated negatively irrespective of non-cooperators' motivation.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Ancestral social environments plus nonlinear benefits can explain cooperation in human societies.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The gut microbiota affects the social network of honeybees.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Volatile social environments can favour investments in quality over quantity of social relationships.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The genetic evolution of altruism (i.e., a behavior resulting in a net reduction of the survival and/or reproduction of an actor to benefit a recipient) once perplexed biologists because it seemed paradoxical in a Darwinian world. More than half a century ago, W. D. Hamilton explained that when interacting individuals are genetically related, alleles for altruism can be favored by selection because they are carried by individuals more likely to interact with other individuals carrying the alleles for altruism than random individuals in the population ("kin selection"). In recent decades, a substantial number of supposedly alternative pathways to altruism have been published, leading to controversies surrounding explanations for the evolution of altruism. Here, we systematically review the 200 most impactful papers published on the evolution of altruism and identify 43 evolutionary models in which altruism evolves and where the authors attribute the evolution of altruism to a pathway other than kin selection and/or deny the role of relatedness. An analysis of these models reveals that in every case the life cycle assumptions entail local reproduction and local interactions, thereby leading to interacting individuals being genetically related. Thus, contrary to the authors' claims, Hamilton's relatedness drives the evolution to altruism in their models. The fact that several decades of investigating the evolution to altruism have resulted in the systematic and unwitting rediscovery of the same mechanism is testament to the fundamental importance of positive relatedness between actor and recipient for explaining the evolution of altruism.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.