To save or not to save your family member's life? Evolutionary stability of self-sacrificing life history strategy in monogamous sexual populations.

ABSTRACT:

Background

For the understanding of human nature, the evolutionary roots of human moral behaviour are a key precondition. Our question is as follows: Can the altruistic moral rule "Risk your life to save your family members, if you want them to save your life" be evolutionary stable? There are three research approaches to investigate this problem: kin selection, group selection and population genetics modelling. The present study is strictly based on the last approach.

Results

We consider monogamous and exogamous families, where at an autosomal locus, dominant-recessive alleles determine the phenotypes in a sexual population. Since all individuals' survival rate is determined by their altruistic family members, we introduce a new population genetics model based on the mating

SUBMITTER: Garay J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6642471 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature