Reintroducing Kin Selection to the Human Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

Humans are often altruistic in a variety of contexts, even toward strangers they may never meet again. What explains this behavior? Many argue that kin selection cannot explain it but group selection can. Contra this common line of reasoning, I provide two ways that kin selection might help explain the evolution of broad-scope human altruism: in gene-culture coevolution and in a ‘cultural’ version of kin selection.