While the individuals chosen for a genome-wide association study (GWAS) may not be closely related to each other, there can be distant (cryptic) relationships that confound the evidence of disease association. These cryptic relationships violate the GWAS assumption regarding the independence of the subjects’ genomes, and failure to account for these relationships results in both false positives...

Contemporary social and medical changes – such as the rising divorce rates and rates of subsequent remarriage, the introduction of new fertility techniques and rising longevity – trigger public debates about kinship, nature and culture. At the same time, ‘ the master narrative ’ telling how kinship declined in the course of modernization has been largely rejected by historians. Now, however, ‘ ...

Populations of red grouse (Lagopus lagopus scoticus) undergo regular multiannual cycles in abundance. The 'kinship hypothesis' posits that such cycles are caused by changes in kin structure among territorial males producing delayed density-dependent changes in aggressiveness, which in turn influence recruitment and regulate density. The kinship hypothesis makes several specific predictions abou...

As many as 3% of children in the United States live in kinship care arrangements with caregivers who are relatives but not the biological parents of the child. A growing body of evidence suggests that children who cannot live with their biological parents fare better, overall, when living with extended family than with nonrelated foster parents. Acknowledging this, federal laws and public polic...

Kinship was one of the key areas of research interest among anthropologists in the nineteenth century, one of the most hotly debated areas of theory in the early and mid-twentieth century, and yet an area of waning interest by the end of the twentieth century. Since then, the study of kinship has experienced a revitalization, with concomitant disputes over how best to proceed. This special issu...

Computational facial models that capture properties of facial cues related to aging and kinship increasingly attract the attention of the research community, enabling the development of reliable methods for age progression, age estimation, age-invariant facial characterization, and kinship verification from visual data. In this paper, we review recent advances in modelling of facial aging and k...

The epistatic kinship describes the probability that chromosomal segments of length x in Morgan are identical by descent. It is an extension from the single locus consideration of the kinship coefficient to chromosomal segments. The parameter reflects the number of meioses separating individuals or populations. Hence it is suggested as a measure to quantify the genetic distance of subpopulation...