THE EVOLUTION OF EUSOCIALITY

By Martin A. Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita, Edward O. Wilson. Nature, 2010

1,385 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Eusociality, in which some individuals reduce their own lifetime reproductive potential to raise the offspring of others, underlies the most advanced forms of social organization and the ecologically dominant role of social insects and humans. For the past four decades kin selection theory, based on the concept of inclusive fitness, has been the major theoretical attempt to explain the evolution of eusociality. Here we show the limitations of this approach. We argue that standard natural selection theory in the context of precise models of population structure represents a simpler and superior approach, allows the evaluation of multiple competing hypotheses, and provides an exact framework for interpreting empirical observations.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Genetics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b0db9c36664c8a438c17456b4e520f062babbae9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Genetics

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory, Findings and Controversies (2015, methodology): “Moreover, Bayesian-MCMC methods can explicitly detect and handle cross-lineage borrowing (Matthews et al. 2011).”
Defensive microbial symbionts in Hymenoptera (2014, background): “The evolution of nest-building and provisioning behavior in some groups has probably laid the foundation for the subsequent evolution of differential degrees of social behavior, ultimately culminating in the complex societies of eusocial bees, wasps, and ants (Andersson 1984).”
Patterns of parental care in invertebrates (2012, background): “Creating highly favourable environmental space selects for adults to remain in such spaces, and also provides an advantageous place for eggs and young to develop (Nowak et al. 2010).”
Origin of termite eusociality: trophallaxis integrates the social, nutritional, and microbial environments (2015, background): “As ecological patterns are not independent of evolution (Pelletier et al., 2009; Nowak et al., 2010; Van Dyken & Wade, 2012; Hernandez et al., 2013), a damp, rotting log best supplies the framework for understanding the selective pressures and phenotypes that maximised fitness when cockroaches…”
Self-Transcendent Emotions and Their Social Functions: Compassion, Gratitude, and Awe Bind Us to Others Through Prosociality (2017, background): “Evolutionary claims about the functions of awe are predicated on the assumption that individuals attain goals (e.g., hunting large mammals) and fend off threats (e.g., warfare) more successfully in groups than alone (Dunbar & Shultz, 2007; Nowak et al., 2010; Sober & Wilson, 1998).”
The Physiological and Genomic Bases of Bumble Bee Social Behaviour (2015, background): “However, this was recently challenged (Allen et al., 2013; Nowak et al., 2010; Wilson and Nowak, 2014), with the argument that relatedness among members of a eusocial colony is the consequence rather than the cause for sociality.”
Nesting Biology and Subsociality in Ceratina calcarata (Hymenoptera: Apidae) (2010, background): “The association between parasite pressure and cooperative nesting, even at low frequency, suggests that increased adult mortality and brood parasitism are likely causes of subsocial nesting in Ceratina (Lin and Michener 1972; Evans 1977; Andersson 1984; Crespi 1994).”
Autocurricula and the Emergence of Innovation from Social Interaction: A Manifesto for Multi-Agent Intelligence Research (2019, background): “Those colonies that are better able to maintain internal cooperation, e.g., by establishing reproductive division of labor, are more likely to be successful in colony-level competition (Nowak et al., 2010).”