Editor's Summary
15 February 2007
Keep it out of the family
Inbreeding is a bad thing, and many animals have evolved mechanisms for assessing genetic relatedness in order to avoid it. Whether such an in-built mechanism exists in humans has been controversial, but a new study of sibling behaviour finds evidence to support the idea. The study suggests that we use two distinct cues to compute a 'kinship index'. If a potential sibling is younger, we watch to see how much time he or she spends with our mother. If the sibling is older, we assess how much time we ourselves have spent with that person.
Article: The architecture of human kin detection
Debra Lieberman, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides
doi:10.1038/nature05510
Abstract | Full Text | PDF (222K) | Supplementary information