Gene-Centered Mechanisms for Explaining Altruistic Behavior in Humans

Natural selection can also explain altruistic behavior. We'll talk about kin selection first and then we'll come back to reciprocal altruism in a little bit. So when an individual produces an offspring through sexual reproduction with some slight wiggle room for things like mitochondria the offspring contains 50% of the genetic material that the parent had. Bill Hamilton who is now dead but is one of the great 20th century evolutionary biologists pointed out was that you could predict the altruistic behavior of an individual based on the degree of relatedness between the two parties.