Blood is thicker than water, but it is not thicker than sperm.

The most common beneficiary of a will is the surviving spouse or partner.

Kin selection does not include spouses.

Kin selection does not explain the large variation between individuals in helping effort, which variation may reflect perceived costs at a given time and in a given place.

Competition between relatives may reduce the effects of direct and indirect fitness benefits.

The longer one lives, the more opportunity one has to influence one’s kin in whatever ways one chooses, so that kin selection is a function of individual fitness.

Kin selection in ants may be an artefact of the death of cell lines, so that existent numbers of kin relatives form a greater proportion of a given set.

What explains the persistence of the controversy between kin selection and group selection? Kin selection is easier to model mathematically than group selection, which requires group stability and reproductive isolation across generations: “…our very simple model is too complicated to allow an exact calculation of the fixation probabilities.” The need for a parsimonious explanation fails to distinguish between rules for explanations and explanations, and says more about the cellular strata of the human cerebral cortex than it does about the social strata of the red grouse.