Need for Alloparental Care and Attitudes Toward Homosexuals in 58 Countries: Implications for the Kin Selection Hypothesis

Homosexuality is an evolutionary puzzle. Many theories attempt to explain how a trait undermining individual reproduction can be maintained, but experimental testing of their predictions remains scarce. The kin selection hypothesis (KSH) is an important theoretical framework to account for the evolution of human homosexuality, postulating that its direct cost to reproduction can be offset by inclusive fitness gains through alloparental assistance to kin. Consistent evidence in support of the KSH has only been garnered from research on Samoan fa’afafine (i.e. feminine, same-sex attracted males), whereas research in numerous industrialized societies has repeatedly failed to secure empirical support for the theory. Here, we propose an alternative test of the KSH by investigating how need for alloparental care influences women’s attitudes toward homosexuality (AtH). AtH would influence the likelihood of women receiving alloparental care from homosexual kin. We applied logistic regression analysis to a large dataset (17,295 women in 58 countries) derived from the World Values Survey. As predicted by the KSH, women who are potentially most in need of alloparental support exhibit significantly more positive attitudes toward homosexuals. For single mothers who expressed parental care concerns, each additional child mothered was associated with an increase of 1.24 in their odds of exhibiting positive attitudes toward homosexuals. Our study is the first to provide circumstantial evidence in support of the KSH on a global scale

Estimating the Thermochemistry of Adsorbates Based Upon Gas-Phase Properties

A method for estimating the enthalpy, entropy, and heat capacity for adsorbates on metals is presented. The only input parameters are the binding energy of the adsorbate and the geometric properties of the gas-phase precursor. The method assumes that the vibrational frequencies of the metal lattice and the gas-phase precursor are conserved upon adsorption. Six “rules of thumb” are presented to estimate the new vibrational frequencies that correspond to the loss of external translation and rotation upon adsorption. The method is tested against density functional theory calculations for 17 species and 36 reversible reactions for methane steam reforming on Ni(111)[3]. The heats of adsorption and heats of reaction at 800 °C are correctly predicted to within 1 kcal/mol. The entropy of reaction is less accurate, with an average deviation of 3.1 cal/mol/K, but in the context of rapid development for thermodynamically consistent mechanisms and computational catalyst screening for high-temperature applications, this error may be tolerable