Data from: The evolution of indiscriminate altruism in a cooperatively breeding mammal

Kin selection theory suggests that altruistic behaviours can increase the
fitness of altruists when recipients are genetic relatives. Although
selection can often favour the ability of organisms to preferentially
cooperate with close kin, indiscriminately helping all group mates may
yield comparable fitness returns if relatedness within groups is very
high. Here, we show that meerkats (Suricata suricatta) are largely
indiscriminate altruists who do not alter the amount of help provided to
pups or group mates in response to their relatedness to them. We present a
model showing that indiscriminate altruism may yield greater fitness
payoffs than kin discrimination where most group members are close
relatives and errors occur in the assessment of kinship. The presence of
errors in the assessment of kinship provides a feasible explanation for
associations between kin discriminative helping and group relatedness in
cooperative breeding vertebrates.