For families, kinship coefficients are quantifications of the amount of genetic sharing between a pair of individuals. These coefficients are critical for understanding the breeding habits and genetic diversity of diploid populations. Historically, computations of the inbreeding coefficient were used to prohibit inbred marriages and prohibit breeding of some pairs of pedigree animals. Such proh...

To assess familial aggregation of autism, 86 autistic subjects were linked to the Utah Genealogical Database. Kinship coefficients were estimated for all possible pairs of autistic subjects and then averaged. Fifty replicate sets of matched control subjects (86 members in each set) were drawn randomly from the database, and the average kinship coefficient was computed for all possible pairs of ...

Chagnon’s analysis of a well-known axe fight in the Yanomamö village of Mishimishiböwei-teri (Chagnon and Bugos 1979) is among the earliest empirical tests of kin selection theory for explaining cooperation in humans. Kin selection theory describes how cooperation can be organized around genetic kinship and is a fundamental tool for understanding cooperation within family groups. Previous analy...

Attempts to address racial disproportionality in child welfare must include a focus on the benefits and challenges facing children in kinship care. African American children not only are overrepresented in the child welfare system, but also are placed disproportionately in kinship foster care. Using a sample of 18 African American adolescents ages 11 to 14, this article explores how the relatio...

Languages are transmitted through channels created by kinship systems. Given sufficient time, these kinship channels can change the genetic and linguistic structure of populations. In traditional societies of eastern Indonesia, finely resolved cophylogenies of languages and genes reveal persistent movements between stable speech communities facilitated by kinship rules. When multiple languages ...

The concept of marking was discovered in phonology by Trubetzkoy and generalized to morphology and grammar by Jakobson. In a fundamental application to anthropology, Greenberg integrated a generalized concept of marking into a cognitivelinguistic theory of kinship universals. Greenberg’s theory is important for three reasons: (1) it leads to the discovery and explanation of cross-cultural unive...

Evolution of cooperation is a fundamental question of socio-biology. Intrinsic factors like kinship play an important role in cooperation among selfish individuals. External factors like uncertainty and the structure of the social interaction network also contribute significantly to the evolution of cooperation. Here I use agent-based simulations to generate artificial social networks. I show t...

Kinship used to be described as what anthropologists do. Today, many might well say that it is what anthropologists do not do. One possible explanation is that the notion of kinship fell off anthropology’s radar due to the criticisms raised by Needham and Schneider among others, which supposedly demonstrated that kinship is not a sound theoretical concept. Drawing inspiration from epidemiologic...

Kinship plays a fundamental role in human communities as a basic principle for organizing individuals into social groups. Representing kinship relationships in a formal and precise way is then a crucial task when modelling many knowledge domains, and it may constitute a relevant benchmark for the reasoning layer of the Semantic Web. In this paper we face the problem of representing some basic a...