Farrelly [ 40] provided evidence that fertility (stage of the menstrual cycle) has little effect on female preferences for helpful males and interpreted this as being consistent with women perceiving helping behaviours as a signal of likely non-genetic benefits [ 19, 32, 41].
But what I think is the case is that the roots of human morality are to be found in a Darwinian understanding of helping behaviours.
Studies of conformity, obedience, and helping behaviours (which benefit others without reward) are three areas in this field that have received considerable attention.
To be a bit more precise, the genes that we have, and which play a role in our helping behaviours, are more likely to be found in our relatives than in our non-relatives.
Ever since WD Hamilton, as a young doctoral student in the early 1960s, uncovered the mathematics that explains the genetics of helping behaviours, evolutionary biologists have explored the extent to which such rules explain morality in humans.
Helper spacing behaviour also affected the frequencies of two helping behaviours.
If helpers have a reduced food intake under predation risk, this will reduce their body reserves and therefore might reduce their investment in helping behaviours and breeder appeasement.
Despite helpers were feeding less, we detected no significant reductions in helping behaviours in the predation treatments compared to the control treatment, which refutes our hypothesis 3 (reproductive benefits/inheritance, Table 3).
These predictions are similar to those made for (2), except that we now expect all helping behaviours to decrease in the predator treatments, and the expected difference between large and medium helpers runs opposite from (2).
However, without knowing the fitness benefits of each single helping behaviour to both the actor and the recipient, conclusions must remain preliminary (e.g. by manipulating investment in single helping behaviours only [26], combined with measuring fitness effects).
(2) If helpers tailor their helping effort to avoid immediate predation ('risk avoidance hypothesis'), firstly, risky helping behaviours like territory defence should be reduced if immediate helper survival interests prevail (survival was reduced under predation [11]).
