ABSTRACT
The theory of kin selection is an attempt to deal with the complex interactions seen among relatives, and the frequent reference to kin selection in the symposium shows its importance to sociobiology. This chapter argues that understanding has been hampered by failure to distinguish the ecological from the evolutionary problem of sexuality. In important ways, insights gained from conceptual or experimental comparisons of sexual populations and competing clones may be misleading in relation to sexual and clonal reproduction as alternative processes in a population. The universality of sexual reproduction remains a major unsolved mystery. It is explicitly a mystery in relation to kin selection, on which so much of sociobiological thought depends. Genetic diversification and recombination might have evolved as an incidental consequence of self defense, but would become an important factor in the subsequent evolution of meiosis.
