 Well, thank you, Beth, and thank you for being here this morning. I come from the field of law. And I'm sorry. OK. I come from the field of law. And I was asked to speak about the implications for law of evolutionary theory and behavioral research pursuing that theory, and to at least introduce that topic to you at this conference. There are several good examples of work in the law pursuing evolutionary theory and behavioral biology research. For example, there's been some very good work done around the incidence of child maltreatment. And the risk posed specifically by step parents, very rich literature developing in that area. Another area that has been developed is that of rape, and the idea that it is not simply about aggression and violence, as many legal theorists have posited. But rather, there is a sexual aspect to it that is significant and has implications for penalties and treatment in that area. And another, a third area that has been pursued quite extensively is that in the employment discrimination area and using evolutionary theory and coalition building and the policing of sexual boundaries to help courts and other legal decision-makers determine when discrimination is, and the magic words in the law because of sex. And so that has been enlightening in that area. So there are several good examples, but I struggle to fit what's going on in this field to what is the topic of this conference and wanted to talk, chose to talk about foster care, the foster care area, because frankly, first of all, that's the area I'm most familiar with and that I do my work in. But also because there is a health aspect to this work. In terms of what I'll be talking about, a lot about grandparent investment and you'll see why that's relevant to this. But grandparent investment studies that look at nutrition and mortality of children in the ancestral past and some in contemporary societies and that is relevant in this area. There's also certainly a legal aspect to the work in this area around foster care and specifically the federal law has strongly favored placement of children with kin. That is a strong trend over the last decade or two and the law, the federal law expressly incorporates that requiring child welfare agencies to seek out relatives of children being placed in foster care. First of all, and then to offer them opportunities and support to serve as foster parents. And so the law at the federal level has certainly done that and driven the states to do that too. And I can certainly give you concrete examples of legal provisions that do this, but I wanna move into kind of the research that supports or doesn't support that move. And just some background facts as we get into this and I'm gonna get into the theory and the research, but you should know that now in many large urban child welfare systems, over 50% of the placements of foster care placements are with kin. So it is something that has really taken over the field. And you should also realize as background that there are still a lot of doubts about this. If you talk to case workers in the field, they're very nervous about this trend. Because the idea is that look, we just took this child away from a dysfunctional family situation and now the law, the courts are placing this child right back into that situation. Yes, extended family, but still in the minds of many a dangerous situation posing a lot of risk. And you should also realize final background point that these decisions about foster care placement are made in a rather chaotic environment. Case workers have to move fast. There's a shortage of time and there's a shortage of resources. Oftentimes it boils down to, I've just got to find a bed for this child right now. And whatever is open that's minimally acceptable will work. And so the risk is high in this environment of exposing children to maltreatment and further damage. And so any tools that we can give to case workers in this situation are gonna be beneficial. Okay, so that's the background. Now let me start talking about or introduce you to kind of the evolutionary concepts and the behavioral biology research on kinship that is gaining attention from social work researchers in this field and legal scholars. The idea is that this research, this theoretical research may help generate knowledge that supports more sophisticated foster care placement policies and practices. So the concepts allow for the formulation of two testable hypotheses that may help alleviate concerns about and improve practice around kinship foster care placements. And the first hypothesis is that on average, children are likely to experience better treatment and outcomes in kinship foster care as opposed to non-kin foster care. And there are two basic behavioral biology concepts that allow for the formulation of this hypothesis that I just wanna describe briefly. The first is the concept of degree of relatedness. Now this is often described through the idea of shared genes that two individuals share genes and therefore there's this degree of relatedness. It's more accurate to talk about the probability of sharing a specific genetic segment or allele. And that's what degree of relatedness is really about. And I can chart the probabilities by degree of relatedness as shown here. For first degree kin, for instance, your child or your sibling, the probability is that you share 50, there's a 50% probability that you share a specific genetic segment with that individual. For second degree kin, as you can see grandparents or nieces and nephews, 25% probability. And you see it go down the list as you get further away in terms of degree of relatedness. Finally, with non-kin, unrelated individual virtually a 0% probability of a sharing of a specific genetic segment. Now related to that concept of degree of relatedness is the concept of inclusive fitness. And from an evolutionary perspective, individuals benefit not only from direct reproductive success, their own children, but also indirectly from the reproductive success of kin because of that probability of shared genetic material. So your child is likely to pass on, there's a high probability, 50%, that your child will pass on your genetic material in a specific segment. And you can use a simple equation to convey that concept. Here showing that for instance, a mutation for kinship altruism will spread if the reproductive cost for the altruist is less than the reproductive benefit for the recipient of the altruism discounted by the degree of relatedness. That probability of sharing a specific genetic segment. And it turns out that this condition often existed within the ancestral evolutionary environment. And the result has been a spread or was a spread of a trait for kinship altruism. This behavioral tendency to favor kin. Now both animal and human research has repeatedly found this differential kinship altruism. Individuals tend to favor close kin, especially with help related to evolutionary important matters such as food provision and from my talk most importantly childcare. The conceptual result here is that higher levels of parental investment, more childcare, more close supervision, less neglect, less abuse are expected from close kin and from more distant kin and certainly from non-kin. The empirical research addresses this first hypothesis specifically. Researchers have begun studies that compare kinship to non-kin foster care placements. In a comprehensive review published in 2004, revealed that despite kinship care homes receiving on average less financial support, less training, less services, they're just child welfare agencies just don't pay attention to kinship placements as much. There was despite that, there was no evidence of worst child wellbeing or adult outcomes. And several studies indicated that kinship foster homes are superior in one important area and that's placement stability. And placement stability is a proxy for good outcomes for children in foster care. And that is higher with kinship placements. One study showed children in kinship foster care three times less likely to have to move from that placement. And more recent studies have confirmed this benefit of kinship placements. Very interesting study done recently by Gretchen Perry and Martin Daly and those of you that are into the evolutionary psychology field will recognize the name Martin Daly or the leading researcher in the area. They used a data set from Ontario, Canada and found that genetic kin placements were significantly more stable than both non-genetic kin placements and non-kin placements. Now you may, if you're not in the field of child welfare you may wonder, what's a non-genetic kin placement? Well, because of the definition in the child welfare of kin to include both neighbors and friends that have a prior relationship with the child there are non-genetic kin placements. And these researchers being evolutionary psychologists drew the line for genetic kin placements versus non-genetic kin placements and non-kin placements generally and found that that line is the demarcation that really makes a difference in terms of placement stability. A Swedish study, a study using a data set from Sweden made similar findings previously. This research is a good start but we need to be more sophisticated studies based on evolutionary concepts and detailed child outcome data. Certainly more detailed than just placement stability which again is a proxy for good outcomes but not the outcomes themselves. Some recent research has begun to pursue this line of inquiry. For example, David Rubin and his colleagues in Philadelphia using the national study on child and adolescent well-being the NASCAR data set that many of you may know compared kinship placements with non-kin placements in terms of behavioral well-being measures and found that children placed in kinship care exhibited a higher level of mental health and well-being. Melissa Dolan and her colleagues also used the NASCAR data set and they compared parenting provided by grandmothers to that provided by non-kin foster parents and found that grandmothers had significantly better parenting scores. And we need to continue this type of examination and we need to examine the differences among types of kin is what the evolutionary theory would tell us. We need to move away from simple comparisons of this bimodal kind of comparison of all kin versus all non-kin and look within the kin category. Perry and Daly began this as I mentioned by separating genetic kin from non-genetic kin but there are distinctions to be made among genetic kin that need to be explored as I will explain. One study of note goes in this direction examining the degree of genetic relationship within kinship placements. And it was actually just to mention a by-product of a study that was looking at differences in terms of legal options for permanency. In other words, if a child is adopted or if there's a permanent guardianship or a permanent foster care placement, does that make a difference? The legal category that the child has put in. Mark Testa, the child welfare researcher who did this work also decided just to compare degrees of relatedness type of kin as kind of a side sort of inquiry. What he found is that there were no significant differences in terms of the legal options. Children in adoption did the same as children in guardianship and that kind of thing. No significant differences. The only significant differences in his study were by degree of relatedness. So as to intent to raise a child to adulthood, grandparents and aunts and uncles were significantly more likely than other relatives who were significantly more likely than non-relatives to raise the foster child to adulthood. So Testa's findings concerning the significant effects of the degree of relatedness on the caregiver-child relationship justify an inquiry concerning distinctions among genetic kin, not simply this bimodal inquiry again with kin versus non-kin. And Andrew Zen, a scholar at the University of Chicago's Chapin Hall Research Center on Child Welfare has begun this type of examination and it's been very interesting through sophisticated cluster analysis. He has identified four distinct types of kin placement with the degree to which the kinship parents are related to the foster child in their care being one of two primary indicators in kinship caregiver competence. The other one is the number and age of non-foster children in the home. But the degree of relationship is again one of these two primary indicators. And his first study using the four kinship types has found significant differences in terms of the timing and disposition of children's placement outcomes. So do they disrupt? Do they reunify with their parents? Do they get adopted? The differences among these groups are significant and again one of the key predictors is the degree of relationship. So it's starting to happen this research in this area but behavioral biology concepts suggest that more complex distinctions among kin exist and we could use this to further research in this area. Now evolutionary concepts allow one to formulate a second hypothesis based on what I've been talking about. And that mainly is that children in kinship foster care are likely to experience on average better treatment and outcomes when placed with some types of kin rather than others. And to be more specific, two additional behavioral biology concepts allow for the formulation of the second hypothesis in addition to degree of relatedness and inclusive fitness that I've already described. The first is the concept of paternity certainty or the laterality effect. The starting point here is that there is a difference in certainty of biological relationship to a child for men and women. Women being virtually 100% certain that the child they care for is their child, men not, that there is a degree of risk of providing care to a child who is not biologically related to them. Evolutionary researchers have done some interesting work on this and the finding is that back in the evolutionary environment the error rate, so to speak, was about 10 to 15%. Current cultural situation, it ranges from three to 7% if you look in the literature, but there is this degree of risk for men that women don't face. So the patrilineal line is less certain. And that has implications for extended kin relations. For example, Steve Gallin has said, and I've done a chart of rudimentaries, show my PowerPoint skills, but this captures what Steve Gallin says, and I'll quote from him, says that reduced paternity certainty decreases the probability of genetic relatedness in a way that compounds multiplicatively over kinship links through males. Thus, if under a given mating regime a man has a paternity certainty of 80%, he has a grand paternity certainty through his wife's sons of 64%, but a corresponding grand paternity certainty through his wife's daughters of 80%. And the conceptual result here is that a grandparent is expected to favor daughter's children over son's children, on average. There's just a more certain biological relationship there. And more generally, patrilineal kin are expected to receive less favorable treatment. This is the laterality effect. The second additional concept here in play for the second hypothesis that I showed is the sex effect. Behavioral tendencies related to childcare are expected to differ between men and women. Women have a higher biological stake in each child with a significant biological and time investment in contrast to men. Just take pregnancy, for example, a woman is committed for nine months, a man not. And so the theory here is that women have developed a tendency to invest more in their children. Men have a higher stake on the other hand in mating effort, that they have the option to move on quickly, unfettered, and they have developed a tendency to invest less in childcare more in mating effort. That's the evolutionary theory of the sex effect and the conceptual result. Because this also has impacts in terms of behavior of extended kin, is that women tend to invest more in kin than men. All right, now, I wanna talk about the empirical research that kinda puts these theories to test, this laterality effect, the sex effect. And there's been this very interesting, and this is the core of my talk here for this conference, interesting set of studies of grand parental investment. And there are two lines within this set. The first line I think is the most interesting here today, and that's the historical population studies using village registries from the past. And there are a series of studies that have focused on child nutrition and mortality. For example, there was a study done with a registry from a village in central Japan from 1671 to 1871, and the researcher studied the effects of grand parental presence on the probability of a child's death. In this society, a child was 35% less likely to die if maternal grandparent, maternal grandmother was present in the household. Presence of the paternal grandmother in both types of grandfather actually increased the likelihood of death. Another study was of a German village from 1720 to 1784. Here the researcher studied the effects of a grandparent being alive, simply alive at the child's birth on the probability of a child's death. And the researchers found that there was a 1.8 times greater risk of early child death if maternal grandmother is not alive at the child's birth. Other grandparents did not reduce the risk of death with the paternal grandmother actually increasing the risk during the first month of life. Another study from an English village in 1770 to 1861 found that children were 1.9 times more likely to die before age five if their maternal grandmother had died before they were born. Other grandparents had no effect on early death. A little more contemporary study looking at two villages in rural Gambia from 1950 to 1970 studied weight and height gain along with mortality during the first five years of life, finding that maternal grandmother was the only kin member to have a consistent positive effect. Other grandparents had no significant effect. And it's interesting to note in this study maternal grandmothers who were still reproductively active had a somewhat less positive effect. So the highest investment grandmother is a maternal grandmother who is beyond the years of reproductive activity. And finally there that I'll talk about for examples is a contemporary study from rural Ethiopia that looked at the effect of kin on child survival and growth. And grandmothers especially maternal grandmothers have a positive effect on child survival. Well paternal grandmothers may elevate a male grandchild's risk of death. So grandsons had a higher risk of death with a paternal grandmother. As for growth in terms of height and weight maternal grandmothers have a positive effect for both. Well paternal grandmothers have a mixed effect positive for height but negative for weight of grandsons. Just as a side point it's interesting to note these findings may support some new research on the effect of the X chromosome which is passed only from grandmothers to granddaughters. It shows that the research in this area goes on new theory here. One of the strongest predictions of this new theory is that paternal grandmothers may harm grandsons in favor of granddaughters. And several recent studies have supported this theory. So again the research goes on. But two recent comprehensive reviews of these population studies have been completed. The first by researchers Ciaran Mace they conclude that 45 studies of whether the presence of kin affects child survival rates indicate that maternal grandmothers have a more variable effect or more indicate that maternal grandmothers have a consistent beneficial effect. Well paternal grandmothers have a more variable effect. They can be beneficial or harmful. Grandfathers do not appear to affect child survival across studies. In contrast, Strasman and Garard's meta analysis of 17 studies that was conducted in response to Ciaran Mace, their work finds support for both maternal grandparents both grandmother and grandfather having beneficial effects while both paternal grandparents had negative effects. The debate and the research in this area continues but in summary for our purposes here today, maternal grandmothers have a significant positive effect in terms of child nutrition and survival. There's no positive effect it seems from other grandparents are possibly negative. The mechanisms are unclear. These are looking at past data from again village registries. And what we need to do to take the next step I think is do some observational studies of grandparent-grandchild relations. But there is another line of research in the grandparent investment area that is interesting and it uses contemporary subjects. Who do they use at least at the start of this line of studies? Undergrad students, why? Because psychologists it seems always use undergrads. They're kind of captive and they're there and you know, invincible that kind of thing. And Decay did the first major study using U.S. undergraduates. You learn Weizel did the study using German young adults. Both studies asked participants to rate the involvement of each of their grandparents through age seven in four areas. Time invested, knowledge that they conveyed, gifts that they provided, and emotional closeness that they established. And the results here confirm the laterality effect. And you can see their results produce a rank listing of grandparents with maternal grandmothers expected to invest the most followed by maternal grandfathers, paternal grandmothers next and last paternal grandfathers with each category having a statistically significant difference in terms of investment. And these results have been replicated in subsequent studies. They're robust, even if you control for distance between grandparent and grandchild. Level of education of grandparent and many other factors, these results continue. And two recent studies of note have used especially extensive data sets moving well beyond the use of undergraduates. Daniels Baca used data from 13 European nations via the multinational survey of health, aging and retirement in Europe and found the same results. Pollut used a population of over 7,000 from the United Kingdom and found significant differences between maternal and paternal grandparents in terms of frequencies of contact with their newborn grandchildren while controlling for a wide range of other variables. They also found that maternal grandparents provided a significantly wider range of financial benefits. There have been other studies that have followed up on the grandparent studies that I'll just mention real briefly, study of aunts and uncles, again confirming the sex effect and the laterality effect. Here, this was done with, this is a study that was done with undergraduate students, but you see the sex effect coming out aunts tending to invest more in uncles and the laterality effect, matrilateral aunts tending to invest more than petrilateral aunts and the same for uncles. And these results have been replicated in subsequent studies also. And finally, evolutionary researchers have been looking at cousins, which is a little different. The degree of relatedness is less here. We're talking third degree kin and we're talking at the same generation, but yet the laterality effect appears again from these results as you have more uncertain links through paternity uncertainty, you get less investment. So the summary in this area, the research identifies behavioral tendencies that are present in the absence of conscious awareness, understanding, or calculation of biological relatedness. I wanna be clear on that. It's not like grandparents sit around and think, you know, this is my son. I'm not so sure if that's my grandchild. I think I'll invest more in my daughter's children. No, it's not going on consciously. It's a, again, through evolutionary time, this behavioral tendency has become, it's unconscious and it's become part of human behavior as the theory. And the research is backing that up. So it looks like from the research, there is this behavioral tendency to favor kin over non-kin in terms of altruistic behavior, namely childcare. And as to kin, women invest more than men, the sex effect. And matrilineal kin invests more than patrilineal kin, the laterality effect. Now, the research on discrimination among kin does allow one to develop a rank listing of second degree kin, which has been done in the literature. And this is the rank listing by putting all these effects that I've talked about and even some others together. You'd expect maternal grandmother to invest at the highest level among second degree kin. These are all second degree kin here with paternal grandfather expected to invest the least. And we can use this rank listing to establish a research agenda, which is starting to happen in this area. It provides the foundation for the formulation of useful testable hypotheses. For example, we could examine whether child well-being measures such as attachment, health, school performance, delinquency, and adult outcome measures such as level of education attained, employment, mental health, involvement in the criminal justice system, whether those outcomes are better on average for children placed with maternal grandmothers than for children placed with paternal grandmothers. And my colleagues and I at the University of Pittsburgh have conducted a pilot study using the Allegheny County, which is the Pittsburgh Area Department of Human Services data set. It's administrative data set. It's quite limited. But I just want to talk you through that research and then leave some time for questions. Our data set, a total data set comes as follows. We looked at all children born between 1985 and 1994 who had involvement in the child welfare system in our county. This was our data set. It was rather large, over 42,000 children. You can see the gender and race breakdown. We followed these children through June 2008 when their average age was 18.2 years. We used this total data set to create two data sets that we then did our analysis on. The first being the placement data set and we had over 7,000 children within our total data set that had been placed in foster and kinship care. You can see the race breakdown. By the way, interesting to note, look at the racial difference here from the previous group. You see that black children are placed, 44% up to 65%, at a much higher rate than other children. And that's true across the child welfare system. So just a side note. But in our data set, we had a non-KIN placement group over 4,000 children. These were children that were only in non-KIN foster placements. The KIN placement group, on the other hand, was almost 3,000 children who experienced at least one kinship placement. So that was our first data set that we developed. The second one is very small, but the second one is a kinship care agency data set. This is a small data set, 367 children, where we knew what kind of KIN they were placed with. We could determine that. It was the only, within our total data set, this was the only group we could do that. And you see most of them placed with second degree KIN, grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings, but, and unfortunately, a small number in third degree KIN, and then another number in non-genetic KIN. And we use that to, again, test some of their hypotheses. Okay. The results were underwhelming, I'll tell you right now, and just ruin the story, but this data set was so limited that we didn't have many surprising, or results that helped us in testing these hypotheses. First of all, we only had four outcome measures in this administrative data set. When you do this work, you're limited by what you have. And we had mental health services, the level of mental health services, the level of drug and alcohol treatment services, whether the children were involved in the juvenile justice system, and whether they became involved in the adult criminal system. Those were our four outcomes. You can see that we had, let's see if I have enough. Okay. We only had significant differences with the Kinship Foster children having less mental health services. Thus, we took that as a proxy, less mental health problems. But on the other hand, they had more drug and alcohol services, so more problems in that area. Juvenile justice and criminal justice, no significant differences between the groups. And so, it doesn't really support the first hypothesis, although I should note, the Kinship children, the group that were in Kinship care, were at higher risk. When you measure the factors that show the level of risk children face, the Kinship group was at higher risk for a number of reasons, and I can explain that if you're interested later. But yet, they were coming out about equivalent. So, not full support for the first hypothesis, but some maybe. We then did some regression analysis on juvenile justice involvement, and we found that the non-Kin Foster care placement, Kin Foster placement distinction did not predict juvenile justice placement. Other things did. Race sure does, that's the strongest predictor, but not the placement. And we did the same for jail, same thing, the placement did not predict, but certainly involvement in juvenile justice predicts you're going into the criminal justice system. And these are all typical and consistent with prior research, but for our purposes, again, underwhelming. We also looked at just the number of placements, and we saw that actually the children were in Kinship placement early on, had more moves, it was less stable, that is inconsistent with the prior research I described. That kind of shows that our local county has a problem with their Kinship placement support and system, and that's another benefit of doing this research. We can tell the local authorities, look, you got a problem, and they were very interested in this, and so it was helpful to them that we found this out. Okay, so in the end, the findings fail to date, fail to fully support our first hypothesis. As I said, we had largely equivalent outcomes across the placement types, but we don't have much outcome data, and we certainly don't have data on parental investment levels, so more needs to be done. And the findings, as to the second hypothesis, we found no significant differences as to Kinship type, all about equivalent. So a real failure to support the second hypothesis. I think the problem there is we need a larger population. So we continue to pursue this research, and so what is our next step? Well, we wanna do a focused inquiry using large detailed national data set. So we're gonna use the national survey of child and adolescent wellbeing, which is a very rich data set. It has over 5,000 children who became involved in the child welfare system during 1999 to 2000, plus another 700 children that were in placement for at least 12 months at the start of the study, 30% of them being in Kinship placements. So this data set is quite extensive. It's also very rich in terms of parental investment measures and child outcome measures. And so we can use that data set, we hope, to compare maternal grandmothers to placements with paternal grandmothers. So we're gonna see if those two placements, how they compare. And the findings that we hope may support and justify primary data collection project designed to test these kinship care hypotheses that impact child health and wellbeing. And just to conclude, our ultimate goal here is to generate knowledge that may support more sophisticated foster care placement policies and practices, especially for caseworkers and judges who are caught in the trenches, like I said in this chaotic environment. And it's interesting to note that researchers from the field of behavioral biology are becoming engaged in this specific inquiry. Again, Martin Daley, again, the leading figure in the evolutionary theory area, has recently authored a paper calling for further research in this specific area of foster care placement. And so that adds, I think, intellectual energy and rigor to the inquiry. It's really an opportunity for sophisticated multidisciplinary research. So that's where we are with this. And so this is my case study of implications of behavioral biology research for the law, for guiding policy and law, in this case in the child welfare area. So I welcome your questions and thoughts, comments, and thank you for listening. Thank you very much. I'm a subscriber to this evolutionary psychology blog. It really makes me question, as this did, things that have to do with these evolved behaviors, whether it is my jealousy or anxiety with my marital relations or with my kids, the fact that my kids are more related to me and who the heck is my wife now that I have kids. And as you were talking about, and I think you really hit the nail on the head, these are unconscious things that these people are doing. And when you talked about your objective in doing this study is really to help positively influence the placement of these kids and the practices by which they're done. And I was wondering whether we're sophisticated enough as a society where your results can be actually explained to the foster parent, whether they're paternal or maternal. So you have the deck stacked against you potentially as a paternal grandparent or vice versa. And this is something called inclusive fitness. And this is why maybe you should care that your genes are propagated through this line or whatever. So, number one, can you actually educate these foster parents using your findings? And perhaps number two, with the doubts that a paternal grandfather may have, is there room for positive genetic testing that, yeah, this is my grand kid, 100% I know. Well, I don't know if that would help much because of the unconscious level of this, but yeah, that last point is interesting. Actually, the education point is a valid one. It's a very good concern to raise. My focus, frankly, has been on educating caseworkers and judges. And I don't even know if I'm that hopeful there, let alone foster parents. But the thought is, is that you're putting them on notice to kind of, it's playing the odds, right, the averages. It doesn't dictate that an individual is gonna behave this way. But on average, it's true. And so if a caseworker or a judge knows about this, we'll know if they're dealing with a paternal relative, maybe the level of, maybe not stop the placement, but the level of support ought to be a little higher because the risk is higher. If you can educate the field that much, and certainly if you can try to educate the extended family that were running maybe a higher risk, and that's why these services are being ordered for you, maybe that would be helpful. But I don't know if I need to lecture them on inclusive fitness theory, okay? But just that the risks are higher, okay? Yeah, yeah, sure. You're welcome to stay and ask questions as long as David's willing to entertain them, but I just wanted to give you the directions for lunch. There's gonna be barbecue at the Harvard Law Lawn, and to get there, just go down the hallway through the vendors, down the stairs, follow the signs, turn left, go through the student center, and then there will be a volunteer to direct you to basically just go down the pathway to the lawn, which will be on your left. So, enjoy lunch. There are hopefully the stampede will not take place too soon. I'm familiar with this work, and I think it's great to understand the whole genetic structure, but I also think there's additional considerations that are just as evolutionary, and that has to do with cultural transmission. So clearly, mothers are going to have a stronger relationship with their own mothers than with the mothers of their husbands, and that's going to create a cultural transmission mechanism, which in many ways, I think, provides an alternative set of hypotheses, which are not mutually exclusive. They just have to be considered together. There's also quite a lot of research done by people like Deb Lieberman, for example, which show that the causal factor in whether you consider somebody akin is co-residence, and so the amount of time that you physically spend with someone is in a family, is going to be very consequential, regardless of what the actual genetic relatedness is, and so it seems to me that a more fully rounded program that takes evolution into account is going to have to include, but also go beyond these narrow genetic considerations, and I'll just leave my, you can say what you like about that. Well, thank you, David. I agree with you completely, and more sophisticated research is being done in this area. I mean, there's been some work in societies that do have a patrilineal makeup, and that is indicating what you're indicating, especially in rural Greek society, that the paternal grandfather is an important beneficial high investor figure. So I think the cultural transmission aspect is there, and so we do need to be careful. It does need to be well rounded. I completely agree with that. One practical consequences is that if you're gathering information, you can simply ask who is this given person that needs to be placed in fostered care, who had they spent time with? Yes, right. And that could be information that you could factor in along with just the genetic, you know, the shared genes. I agree, and that's where this non-genetic kin concept is not completely without merit at all, and I don't mean to indicate that, although Perry and Daley's research is indicating that that's a marker, but I think we do need to be more careful if we're gonna bring this into the field. But it's great work for this to be applied, so congratulations on what you're doing. Thank you, thank you very much. Actually, I know nothing about this field at all, but I was gonna ask a similar question, like you're citing data from 200 years ago when perhaps families were more localized and in modern days is like a different relationship more important, so. Yeah, no, and I think that more research needs to be done. As I said, the next step is to do some observational studies where we can see the grandparent-grandchild interaction. This is what we have, you're raising valid concerns as the project goes on, but hopefully we encourage that research, and I think at some point it can be helpful to us in the field, frankly, in a field that needs help because things are so chaotic and unguided. Whatever we can get to play the odds a little bit might be helpful, as long as it's carefully done. And that's what I'm driving at, so. And how do you fund research like this? Well, that's a good question. It's a lot of the reasons that you're using undergrad students for this work is because it's cheap, right? You don't need much. There isn't a lot that I'm aware of, a lot of funders. I come from the legal field and we're not largely scurrying for grants, so I can't say that I've personally tried to raise a lot of money for this, but the National Science Foundation has a law in social science division where we're hoping to apply to, but the story is yet untold, okay? Thanks. Yeah. During your talk, you didn't devote any time to talking about rape, which you had brought up previously, but you sort of assumed that you're familiar with Randy Thornhill's work and all that, and maybe if, what are some of the policy implications for understanding this rape as sort of a sexual strategy? Yeah, Owen Jones is a legal scholar that's used Thornhill's work heavily, and he's written a very good article on kind of raising the points that you're raising or addressing the points that you're raising. One thing that he notes in terms of penalties imposed that may be an alchemical castration is something that we ought to look at seriously because there is this sexual aspect to this. It's not just about violence, you know, that kind of thing. So that's one implication, but I really encourage you to read Owen Jones' work on rape if you really want to get the details on implications. Okay, yep, yep. Hi. Hi. Current research show, including my own research, that communal breeding is really important on the survivorship of children, particularly after about 12 years old. So not just the survivorship of infants, but the survivorship which would be important to inclusive fitness to get your kid to adulthood. And one of the important factors that's shown there is it's not just the presence of one of these relatives, but it's the cumulative effect of the number of relatives. I have an historic population where, in fact, survivorship of the completed family size is larger in communities where you simply have more relatives of the aunts, of the uncles, of the grandmas, of the grandpas. And in fact, very significant was the husband's, the dad's sister, because you have the women, again the cultural effect of cultural evolution where you have the women who hang out together. So even though this woman is not related to this woman, it's your husband's sister, but the children are related because they do so much together. That what you see is this very important role of these women hanging out together and the fact that there are other kind around. Yeah, and you're ready to raise the age issue. I mean, as children become older, that seems to be where the father's investment has the most effect. And also the extended family, as you're indicating in a broader sense. Yeah, I agree. And this field has lots of potential for research that has implications beyond what I gave you as an example here. So I agree. Okay, well, thank you.