Re: how would we define "kin"?

[Matthew Hare]

>I guess the agent in question would have to
>
>(a) know that another agent is related by kinship,
>(b) know _how_ the other agent is related by kinship, and
>(c) behave differently towards different agents as a function of
>different
>    kin relationships.
>
>
>But I think you'd have a clear case of kinship behavior if the three
>criteria (a) - (c) above were fulfilled and you could demonstrate that
>kinship was being determined on the basis of common ancestry and perhaps
>mating relations.

>>I would think kinship would be a more meaningful concept if it meant
>genetic similarity (your later comments) instead of knowledge of kinship
>(your earlier comments).  Because, I assume we are interested in kinship
>because of the behavior that an agent displays and the closeness of that
>behavior to the behavior of another agent.  The issue of whether the agents
>have knowledge of each other does not seem especially important to me.

>>>Maybe there's somebody here who is a better ethologist than I who can
shed some light on the question of whether or not we might expect (real)
animals to behave differentially on the basis of actual genetic
similarity as opposed to membership in a breeding group (which should
correlate pretty well with genetic similarity, but not perfectly).


Well - to add my tuppence-worth -  in the red grouse modelling I'm doing I 
have to implement a kinship response with regards to settling territorial
disputes .... Basically  male Grouse appear to
try to settle territories near their father and the father lets them have
some of his territory. The result is that 
grouse males' territories tend to cluster around their 'grousefather'  ... 
Apparently this is an example of differential aggressiveness between kin and 
non-kin.
The effect is observed as being strongly father-son oriented. Now my knowledge
of genetics is not good enough to be able to know if genetic similarity is 
closer
between fathers and sons than other less immediate family relationships ... As 
a 
result I have no idea about whether or not the grouse actually 
recognise their fathers or 
whether they are just reacting to another bird with a high degree of 
genetic similarity. Scientists at the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology over 
here in 
Scotland are trying to do some experiments in genetic profiling to establish how
behavioural responses between grouse are linked to their genetic similarities so
we'll have to wait a while for a definitive (?) on that. Nevertheless,
the possible genetic causes of the clustering effects are prime issues for 
swarm-like investigation, I'd imagine.
But not for my model yet ... sorry ...  I don't have genetic material in my 
models 
so I have got to stick (quite happily) with Mark's A-C criteria and allow my 
grouse to 
know their fathers - I have one additional criterium though :

d) that the agent knows how their particular reactions to kin may change or 
end over time ...

kin reactions are not constant over time with grouse - 
 they seem to ignore the kinship effect if density gets too
high and it becomes a case of every feathered friend for him or herself !
- hence you can get some interesting density-dependent cycling going on ...

Matt Hare
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Macaulay Land Use Research Institute
Aberdeen
Scotland.

p.s. Apologies if I have said this already, in fact, apologies if I have not 
said it 
already ... but I thought Swarmfest was great... - will there be Swarmfest-II?  




  






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