If we are to cooperate with those who carry our genes how can we do this?
The answer from commentary this week in PNAS is that we need to have a system for tagging people:
"The first to investigate a tag for altruism was W. D. Hamilton (2). He conceived
what he called a supergene, able to produce (i) a distinctive phenotypic
trait, (ii) the faculty to recognize the trait in others, and (iii) the propensity to
direct benefits toward bearers of that trait, even though this entails a fitness cost."
One way to tag genetically related people to cooperate with is to judge how similar a person's face is to your own according to a study last year in 'Evolution and Human Behaviour'.
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