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Animal Behaviors – Chapter 3 Assignment (Finish Part 1-3)

Altruism

If natural selection favors animals that outcompete others, why would animals ever help one another?  This week, we're going examine altruistic behaviors that might seem difficult to explain by natural selection.
key concepts: altruism, kin selection, direct and indirect fitness, inclusive fitness

Part 1- Intro Response (Around 250 words)

Let's start by examining your intuitions about the topic:
According natural selection, traits that increase an individual's fitness (ability to reproduce) will become dominant in a population.  An animal that behaves altruistically aids another individual at some cost to itself.  That is, an altruistic animal increases the fitness of another individual, while decreasing its own fitness. If this altruistic behavior is inherited, then natural selection should favor the receiver, not the giver.  How can we reconcile altruism, which many animals show, with natural selection? How could you test your idea? What does your idea say about human behavior?
Part 2- Background Check (MC Q1-6, Checkpoint Answer)

Let's compare our explanations of altruistic behavior with those in a video from Scientific American.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZlOjVtnRx4

As this video suggests, there are generally two explanations for altruistic behavior: reciprocal altruism and kin selection. This week we'll focus on kin selection, the selection of behaviors that increase the fitness of relatives. Next week, we'll focus on reciprocal altruism and other behaviors that benefit non-relatives.

As an example of kin selection, the video described the extreme altruism of honeybee workers. These animals work only to support their queen, the workers themselves do not reproduce. Does that mean the workers have 0 fitness? (Remember, fitness is measured as reproductive success.) The answer depends on how you calculate fitness. If you look only at direct fitness, the reproductive success of the individual, then because the workers have 0 offspring, they have 0 fitness. If direct fitness were all that mattered, the altruistic behavior of workers should be eliminated by natural selection. But as the video described, the genes for worker behavior can spread through the population in another way: through the worker's relatives. If we consider indirect fitness, an individual's success at reproducing its genes via its relatives, then the worker's fitness can be higher because she supports her sister (or mother) queen and the rest of the colony, who are all her relatives and share some proportion of her genes. 
When biologists evaluate fitness, they look at inclusive fitness which is the sum of direct fitness (how many offspring the individual has) and indirect fitness (how many relatives the individual supports).  Direct fitness is easy to quantify: you simply count up the individual's viable offspring. Indirect fitness is a bit more complicated: you have to determine how many relatives the individual is supporting and multiply that by the degree of relatedness of the individuals (the proportion of genes they share).  It's important to note that what matters is not how many relatives you have, but how many you support.  (If instead of supporting your relatives, you compete with them, you're not increasing your indirect fitness.)
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It's also important to consider the degree of relatedness between the giver and the recipient of the altruistic behavior. You probably know that you are related to your parents by 50% (1/2 of your genes came from your mother and half from your father).  On average, you share 50% of your genes with siblings.  As you move to more distant relatives, relatedness declines: 25% (1/4) for your grandparents as well as for your nieces and nephews, 12.5% (1/8) for your cousins and great-grandparents.  If you want to explore this more, check out this relatedness calculator.  https://apps.nolanlawson.com/relatedness-calculator/

The point is, you will pass on more of your genes if you help close relatives than if you help distant relatives, so natural selection will most strongly favor helping parents, siblings, or children.

MC Q1-6

Q1: Use upside information and link https://apps.nolanlawson.com/relatedness-calculator/

Answer the question.
A simple math problem: A biologist once said, "I would lay down my life for two of my brothers or ___ of my cousins. (Assume that he was basing his pledge on a calculation of indirect fitness. To answer the question you have to compare the coefficient of relatedness for cousins.)

 A : four

 B : eight

 C : twelve

 D: sixteen

Watch the video and answer Q2-3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrgqUC7ZCxQ

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 A: genes are selfish

 B : the information contained within a gene may persist for millions of years

 C : genes are able to undergo mutation

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 A: Darwin

 B : Dawkins

 C : Hamilton

Watch the video and answer Q4 https://nj.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/nat15.sci.lisci.leaf/leaf-cutter-ants-a-farming-super-organism/#.XX2-FZNKiT-

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 A : brothers

 B: cousins

 C : sisters

 D : all of the above

Read the Article https://www.wild-bird-watching.com/helper-birds.html , and answer Q5-6

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 A : usually sisters of the mother bird

 B : one of several males that the mother mated with

 C : offspring from the previous year

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 A : experience as parents

 B: indirect fitness

 C : possession of the territory when the parents die

 D : all of the above

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In wolf packs, only the alpha male and alpha female mate. The other adults forgo breeding and help raise the young. Consider three explanations for this behavior: 
1) The nonbreeding adults need to stay with the pack to survive, and eventually they may become the alpha members.
2) The nonbreeding adults are helping raise their siblings.
3) The nonbreeding adults are less fit than the alpha pair, and they are foregoing reproduction for the good of the species.

Part 3: Conclusion Response (Around 250 words)

Evolutionary psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology that seeks the ultimate explanations for human behavior, that is, explanations based on natural selection.  These psychologists have applied concepts from animal behavior to explain human behavior.  For example, they have used the concept of kin selection to explain the Cinderella effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella_effect

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What is the Cinderella effect? What is the evidence for the effect? Does the kin selection explanation seem plausible?   Could the effect be due to a confound? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201101/why-are-stepparents-more-likely-kill-their-children

 What about adopted children? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-beast/200906/do-parents-favor-natural-children-over-adopted-ones

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