Group size effects in social evolution

Social life, evolution of intelligence, behaviour and human brain size

Social life is one of the most critical factors of the evolution of the behavior of non-human primates and humans. Several factors, such as an increase in brain size, adaptive modules, and grooming, are related to the complexities of social groups. Although some scientists have mentioned foraging as a rival hypothesis for the evolution of behavior, in this research, we tried to investigate the ...

Antimicrobial strength increases with group size: implications for social evolution.

We hypothesize that aggregations of animals are likely to attract pathogenic micro-organisms and that this is especially the case for semisocial and eusocial insects where selection ultimately led to group sizes in the thousands or even millions, attracting the epithet 'superorganism'. Here, we analyse antimicrobial strength, per individual, in eight thrips species (Insecta: Thysanoptera) that ...

Social Group Size Predicts the Evolution of Individuality

Discriminating among individuals is a critical social behavior in humans and many other animals and is often required for offspring and mate recognition, territorial or coalitional behaviors, signaler reliability assessment, and social hierarchies. Being individually discriminated is more difficult in larger groups, and large group size may select for increased individuality-signature informati...

Epidemiological effects of group size variation in social species.

Contact patterns in group-structured populations determine the course of infectious disease outbreaks. Network-based models have revealed important connections between group-level contact patterns and the dynamics of epidemics, but these models typically ignore heterogeneities in within-group composition. Here, we analyse a flexible mathematical model of disease transmission in a hierarchically...

Social Group Size