Synonyms
Definition
The mechanism whereby individuals tend to remain near their place of birth and which leads to high genetic relatedness among neighbors.
Introduction
Population viscosity occurs whenever individuals tend to remain near their place of birth, a process that generates high levels of relatedness among neighbors, which is a key factor to kin selection (Hamilton 1964). Kin discrimination allows individuals to discriminate genealogical relatives and to direct altruism toward them (Hamilton 1964). The greenbeard effect allows individuals to discriminate genetic relatives, irrespective of their genealogical ancestry, in which individuals express a phenotypic trait (i.e., the greenbeard) that they recognize in other individuals so that they are able to direct altruism toward them (Hamilton 1964; Dawkins 1976). Because population viscosity does not require any sophisticated recognition mechanism, it is thought to be a general and important...
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Rodrigues, A.M.M. (2016). Viscous Population. In: Weekes-Shackelford, V., Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3092-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3092-1
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