Related papers: Emergence of Kinship Structures and Descent System…

How does social complexity depend on population size and cultural transmission? Kinship structures in traditional societies provide a fundamental illustration, where cultural rules between clans determine people's marriage possibilities.…

Families form the basis of society, and anthropologists have characterised various family systems. This study developed a multi-level evolutionary model of pre-industrial agricultural societies to simulate the evolution of family systems…

On one hand, kinship is a universal human phenomenon that tends to align with biological relatedness, which might suggest evolutionary foundations. On the other hand, kinship has exceptional variation across the human populations, which…

The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits…

Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…

Extensive cooperation among biologically unrelated individuals is uniquely human and much current research attempts to explain this fact. We draw upon social, cultural, and psychological aspects of human uniqueness to present an integrated…

We present a model for a threshold-based resource redistribution process in a spatially-explicit population, characterizing the relation between kinship network structure, local interactions and persistence. We find that population survival…

We review the problem of confounding in genetic association studies, which arises principally because of population structure and cryptic relatedness. Many treatments of the problem consider only a simple ``island'' model of population…

Divergence between populations for a given trait can be driven by natural or sexual selection, interacting with migration behaviour. Mating preference for different phenotypes can lead to the emergence and persistence of differentiated…

Numerous living systems are hierarchically organised, whereby replicating components are grouped into reproducing collectives -- e.g., organelles are grouped into cells, and cells are grouped into multicellular organisms. In such systems,…

In a complex system, the individual components are neither so tightly coupled or correlated that they can all be treated as a single unit, nor so uncorrelated that they can be approximated as independent entities. Instead, patterns of…

Ethnocentrism is a behavioral strategy seen on every scale of social interaction. Game-theory models demonstrate that evolution selects ethnocentrism because it boosts cooperation, which increases reproductive fitness. However, some believe…

Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…

Mutualistic interactions, which are beneficial for both interacting species, are recurrently present in ecosystems. Observations of natural systems showed that, if we draw mutualistic relationships as binary links between species, the…

Evolutionary transitions occur when previously-independent replicating entities unite to form more complex individuals. Such transitions have profoundly shaped natural evolutionary history and occur in two forms: fraternal transitions…

Many social and biological networks consist of communities - groups of nodes within which connections are dense, but between which connections are sparser. Recently, there has been considerable interest in designing algorithms for detecting…

In human societies, people's willingness to compete and strive for better social status as well as being envious of those perceived in some way superior lead to social structures that are intrinsically hierarchical. Here we propose an…

Investigating relation between various structural patterns found in real-world networks and stability of underlying systems is crucial to understand importance and evolutionary origin of such patterns. We evolve multiplex networks,…

We investigate how the pattern of contacts between species in mutualistic ecosystems is affected by the phylogenetic proximity between the species of each guild. We develop several theoretical tools to measure that effect and we use them to…

Kinship verification is a well-explored task: identifying whether or not two persons are kin. In contrast, kinship identification has been largely ignored so far. Kinship identification aims to further identify the particular type of…