Kin recognition

Kin recognition, also called kin detection, is an organism's ability to distinguish between close genetic kin and non-kin. In evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, such an ability is presumed to have evolved for inbreeding avoidance. While a 2021 meta-analysis of research across 88 diploid species found that animals rarely avoid inbreeding, avoidance is more common in species with developmental co-residence since the latter is a proxy for kin recognition.

An additional adaptive function sometimes posited for kin recognition is a role in kin selection. There is debate over this, since in strict theoretical terms kin recognition is not necessary for kin selection or the cooperation associated with it. Rather, social behaviour can emerge by kin selection in the demographic conditions of 'viscous populations' with organisms interacting in their natal context, without active kin discrimination, since social participants by default typically share recent common origin. Since kin selection theory emerged, much research has been produced investigating the possible role of kin recognition mechanisms in mediating altruism. Some researchers suggest that, taken as a whole, active powers of recognition play a negligible role in mediating social cooperation relative to less elaborate cue-based and context-based mechanisms, such as familiarity and imprinting, whereas other researchers argue that specialized kin recognition mechanisms, such as phenotype matching, are widespread in facilitating nepotism.

Because cue-based 'recognition' predominates in social mammals, outcomes are non-deterministic in relation to actual genetic kinship, instead outcomes simply reliably correlate with genetic kinship in an organism's typical conditions. A well-known human example of an inbreeding avoidance mechanism is the Westermarck effect, in which unrelated individuals who happen to spend their childhood in the same household find each other sexually unattractive. Similarly, due to the cue-based mechanisms that mediate social bonding and cooperation, unrelated individuals who grow up together in this way are also likely to demonstrate strong social and emotional ties, and enduring altruism.

The English evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness, and the related theory of kin selection, were formalized in the 1960s and 1970s to explain the evolution of social behaviours. Hamilton's early papers, as well as giving a mathematical account of the selection pressure, discussed possible implications and behavioural manifestations. Hamilton considered potential roles of cue-based mechanisms mediating altruism versus 'positive powers' of kin discrimination:

The selective advantage which makes behaviour conditional in the right sense on the discrimination of factors which correlate with the relationship of the individual concerned is therefore obvious. It may be, for instance, that in respect of a certain social action performed towards neighbours indiscriminately, an individual is only just breaking even in terms of inclusive fitness. If he could learn to recognise those of his neighbours who really were close relatives and could devote his beneficial actions to them alone an advantage to inclusive fitness would at once appear. Thus, a mutation causing such discriminatory behaviour itself benefits inclusive fitness and would be selected. In fact, the individual may not need to perform any discrimination so sophisticated as we suggest here; a difference in the generosity of his behaviour according to whether the situations evoking it were encountered near to, or far from, his own home might occasion an advantage of a similar kind." (1996 [1964], 51)

These two possibilities, altruism mediated via 'passive situation' or via 'sophisticated discrimination', stimulated a generation of researchers to look for evidence of any 'sophisticated' kin discrimination. However, Hamilton later (1987) developed his thinking to consider that "an innate kin recognition adaptation" was unlikely to play a role in mediating altruistic behaviours:

But once again, we do not expect anything describable as an innate kin recognition adaptation, used for social behaviour other than mating, for the reasons already given in the hypothetical case of the trees.(Hamilton 1987, 425)

The implication that the inclusive fitness criterion can be met by mediating mechanisms of cooperative behaviour that are context and location-based has been clarified by recent work by West et al.: