Kinship

Kinship is one of the major organizing principles of primate social structure. It is of critical importance to evolutionary biologists and anthropologists interested in the origins of cooperation and human kinship systems. Maternal kin recognize each other primarily through familiarity. Mechanisms of paternal kin recognition are still in their infancy, but may be related to reproductive skew and phenotypic matching. Although patterns of kin-related behavior vary widely among and within species, kin favoritism and incest avoidance are reoccurring themes that seem to appear whenever circumstances permit. The reproductive benefits of kin favoritism are beginning to be better understood, as are roles and limitations of kin selection as an explanatory framework.