Work was conducted among traditional, subsistence whale hunters in Lamalera, Indonesia, in order to test if strict biological kinship or lineage membership is more important for explaining the organization of cooperative hunting parties ranging in size from 8 to 14 men. Crew identifications were collected for all 853 hunts that occurred between May 3 and August 5, 1999. Lineage identity and genetic relatedness were determined for a sample of 189 hunters. Results of matrix regression show that genetic kinship explains little of the hunters ’ affiliations independent of lineage identity. Crew members are much more closely related to each other than expected by chance, but this is due to the correlation between lineage membership and genetic kinship. Lineage members are much more likely to affiliate in crews, but kin with r < 0.5 are just as likely not to affiliate. The results are discussed vis-à-vis the evolution of cooperation and group identity.

Work was conducted among traditional, subsistence whale hunters in Lamalera, Indonesia in order to test if kinship or lineage membership is more important for explaining the organization of cooperative hunting parties ranging in size from 8-14 men. Crew identifications were collected for all 853 hunts that occurred between May 3 and August 5, 1999. Lineage identity and genetic relatedness were determined for a sample of 189 hunters. Results of matrix regression show that kinship explains little of the hunters' affiliations independent of lineage identity. Crews are much more related amongst themselves than expected by chance. This is due, however, to the correlation between lineage membership and kinship. Lineage members are much more likely to affiliate in crews, but beyond r = 0.5 kin are just as likely not to affiliate. The results are discussed vis--vis the evolution of cooperation and group identity.

Because of the importance of culture and complex social organization to the evolutionary success of Homo sapiens, individual fitness in humans depends on the structure of social life. Because culture is both constrained and promoted by the human genome, human cognitive, affective, and moral capacities are the product of an evolutionary dynamic involving the interaction of genes and culture. We call this dynamic gene-culture coevolution (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1982, Boyd and Richerson 1985, Dunbar 1993, Richerson and Boyd 2004). This coevolutionary process has endowed us with preferences that go beyond the self-regarding concerns emphasized in traditional economic and biological theory, and with a social epistemology that facilitates the sharing of intentionality across minds. Geneculture coevolution is responsible for the salience of such other-regarding values as a taste for cooperation, fairness, and retribution, the capacity to empathize, and the ability to value such character virtues as honesty, hard work, piety, and loyalty. Gene-culture coevolution is the application of sociobiology, the general theory of the social organization of biological species, to humans—the only species that