In biology, last names have been used as proxy for genetic relatedness in pioneering studies of neutral theory and human migrations. More recently, analyzing the last name distribution of Italian academics has raised the suspicion of nepotism, with faculty hiring their relatives for academic posts. Here, we analyze three large datasets containing the last names of all academics in Italy, resear...

The purpose of this article has been to explore why ethnic conflicts tend to break out in all ethnically divided societies. The principal explanation was traced to the evolved disposition for ethnic nepotism shared by all human populations. Ethnic nepotism was measured roughly by the degree of ethnic heterogeneity of the populations. It was correlated with the scale of ethnic conflicts in the g...

Nepotistic practices are detrimental for academia. Here I show how disciplines with a high likelihood of nepotism can be detected using standard statistical techniques based on shared last names among professors. As an example, I analyze the set of all 61,340 Italian academics. I find that nepotism is prominent in Italy, with particular disciplinary sectors being detected as especially problema...

In animal societies, cooperation for the common wealth and latent conflicts due to the selfish interests of individuals are in delicate balance. In many ant species, colonies contain multiple breeders and workers interact with nestmates of varying degrees of relatedness. Therefore, workers could increase their inclusive fitness by preferentially caring for their closest relatives, yet evidence ...

Nepotism is an important potential conflict in animal societies. However, clear evidence of nepotism in the rearing of queens in social insects is limited and controversial. In the honey bee, Apis mellifera, multiple mating by queens leads to the presence of many patrilines within each colony. When the colonies reproduce through swarming, workers rear a number of new queens, only a few of which...

When helping behaviour is costly, Hamiltonian logic implies that animals need to direct helpful acts towards kin, so that indirect fitness benefits justify the costs. We revisit inferences about nepotism and aggression in Hamilton's 1964 paper to argue that he overestimated the general significance of nepotism, but that other issues that he raised continue to suggest novel research agendas toda...

Dear Editor With increasing emphasis on publications forfaculty recruitment, career advancementand obtaining research grants, the issues relatedto author kinship and academic nepotism havegrown significantly and these probably reflectthe inflationary growth rather than the optimalgrowth warranted due to increasing researchcomplexity. Allesina S (1) measured the fullmagnitude of nepotism in the ...

The performance of employees is important for all organizations. literature has focused on this in the business organization while few examined it educational context. Important variables such as knowledge sharing (KS), nepotism, and trust have not been widely investigated settings developing countries. aim study to investigate impact KS, well academic staff (PAS). In addition, investigates a m...