Coupled with brutal winds, the Antarctic shelves are areas in which few animals could survive. Emperor adults, while cradling their single eggs on their feet, form groups of tightly knit populations. Capillary loss of heat travels by convection in the creche to near-by penguins where it is often sequestered. Penguins on the periphery lose more heat than they gain, while those nearest the center retain and receive more heat. Additionally, winds and drifting snow bombard members of the periphery accelerating the heat lost by these members.
Wind minimally contacts central members of the creche.
In summary, the creche serves as a means for staying warm. To suggest that emperor penguins take their turns so that other penguins have a chance of staying warm is otherwise known as group selection. Group selection is a largely discounted evolutionary theory that presupposes that individuals conduct themselves to ensure the survival of the group with the subtending notion that group survival leads to individual survival. A more appropriate and correct evolutionary theory is kin selection. Kin selection hypothesizes that individuals conduct themselves in such a manner that ensures a survival of that individual as well as those related to it.