Genetic relatedness predicts South African migrant workers' remittances to their families

S. Bowles and Dorrit Posel
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S. Bowles: Santa Fe Institute

Nature, 2005, vol. 434, issue 7031, 380-383

Abstract: Relative values The South Africa Integrated Household Survey collected information from about 9,000 households in the nine months prior to the country's first democratic elections in April 1994. The main aim was to collect data on living standards as a resource for policy makers, but the survey also provides a unique database for sociologists and anthropologists to mine. Bowles and Dorit have done that in a test of the ability of ‘inclusive fitness models’ to predict human behaviour. Migrant miners from rural African households send money to their families: comparison of observed remittances with those predicted to give maximum fitness benefit reveals that genetic relatedness of the migrant to the recipients of the money is a partial predictor of the amounts of money sent. So kin-altruism is a factor here, but one of many.

Date: 2005
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DOI: 10.1038/nature03420

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