Criticism
Leading inclusive fitness theorists such as Grafen have argued that the whole research program around kin recognition is somewhat misguided:
Do animals really recognise kin in a way that is different from the way they recognise mates, neighbours, and other organisms and objects?’. Certainly animals use recognition systems to recognise their offspring, their siblings and their parents. But to the extent that they do so in the same way that they recognise their mates and their neighbours, I feel it is unhelpful to say they have a kin recognition system.” (Grafen 1991, 1095)Others have cast similar doubts over the enterprise:
he fact that animals benefit from engaging in spatially mediated behaviors is not evidence that these animals can recognize their kin, nor does it support the conclusion that spatially based differential behaviors represent a kin recognition mechanism (see also discussions by Blaustein, 1983; Waldman, 1987; Halpin 1991). In other words, from an evolutionary perspective it may well be advantageous for kin to aggregate and for individuals to behave preferentially towards nearby kin, whether or not this behaviour is the result of kin recognition per se” (Tang-Martinez 2001, 25)However, recent evidence suggests that kin recognition can also be mediated by immunogenetic similarity of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). For a discussion of the interaction of these social and biological kin recognition factors see Lieberman, Tooby, and Cosmides (2007). Some have suggested that, as applied to humans, this nature-nurture interactionist perspective allows a synthesis between theories and evidence of social bonding and cooperation across the fields of evolutionary biology, psychology {attachment theory) and cultural anthropology (nurture kinship).
Read more about this topic: Kin Recognition
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Parents sometimes feel that if they don’t criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn’t make people want to change; it makes them defensive.”
—Laurence Steinberg (20th century)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)