Diane Sunar leads a discussion about sibling relationships. We humans are social animals, embedded in social relationships from our first moment on. For many of us, the longest-lasting of all our relationships are the ones we have with our siblings, lasting in many cases from earliest childhood through old age. As a Turkish saying goes, “you can’t sell ’em, and you can’t give ’em away”, so we have those relationships, whether friendly or frosty, whether warm and supportive or hostile and combative, as long as we both live. We will be discussing not just our own experiences of being and having (or not having) siblings, but also exploring whether evolutionary processes have some influence on the ways that siblings relate to one another, in the general context of the ways that parents relate to their children.
A 2008 book chapter entitled "Evolutionary Perspectives on Sibling Relationships" (17 pages of text) is attached here as a resource.