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I was just doing some reading around evolutionary psychology for a course I am doing, and was reading about evolutionary explanations for altruism. Specifically, about something called "kin selection", where the idea is that one form of altruism arises when you favour your relatives because they have a probability of sharing your genes and hence if you help them you increase the chances of their survival and of passing on your genes. (All on the premise of there being no such thing as "pure" altruism I suppose). Anyway, there was an activity based on a study from the 60s (I should reference it I know, but have packed my books away) whereby you were asked to consider if you were in a situation where food was short and you were responsible for sharing it out among your son, brother, cousin and grandmother (after taking your own portion) how would you share it? Instictively and at a gut level I went: son, brother, grandmother, cousin. Well, I suppose in a real life scenario I would agonise and be more complex with it, but that was gut reaction. On paper this is the order the study predicted I would come up with, because of the probability of said relatives sharing my genes - son and brother are equal on 50% probability actually, and I said "son" first and unequivocally, but I think that''s a hairline distinction. The catch of course is that in our case there is no greater chance of a genetic link between my son and me than between any other random member of the population. So how would evolutionary psychology explain that I came up with that instinctively, notwithstanding no genetic link? Any clever soul out there know?