Kinship as a Relation

Kinship as a frequency dependent strategy

Humans divide themselves up into separate cultures, which is a unique and ubiquitous characteristic of our species. Kinship norms are one of the defining features of such societies. Here we show how norms of marital residence can evolve as a frequency-dependent strategy, using real-world cases from southwestern China and an evolutionary game model. The process of kinship change has occurred in ...

Children’s Expectations and Understanding of Kinship as a Social Category

In order to navigate the social world, children need to understand and make predictions about how people will interact with one another. Throughout most of human history, social groups have been prominently marked by kinship relations, but few experiments have examined children's knowledge of and reasoning about kinship relations. In the current studies, we investigated how 3- to 5-year-old chi...

Kinship as Classification : towards a Paradigm of Change

A reticular approach to kinship

Douglas R. White and Michael Houseman For special issue of l’Homme 2013 Regardless of now marriage is locally defined, most people in most places marry (and/or have children with) people who are neither too close (immediate family members) nor overly distant (total strangers). As a result, many members of a given community are linked to each other by multiple direct or indirect ties of consangu...

SNP Markers as Additional Information to Resolve Complex Kinship Cases.

BACKGROUND DNA profiling with sets of highly polymorphic autosomal short tandem repeat (STR) markers has been applied in various aspects of human identification in forensic casework for nearly 20 years. However, in some cases of complex kinship investigation, the information provided by the conventionally used STR markers is not enough, often resulting in low likelihood ratio (LR) calculations....