Are there other ways of explaining these behaviours? Spiteful behaviours have sometimes also been interpreted as a form of altruism or indirect altruism. Mutually harmful behaviours are favoured if they result in a benefit for some third party that is sufficiently related to the actor. Here, there is no requirement for negative relatedness to one’s victims, and so a distinction has been made be...

A recent study suggests that aggression between wasps depends upon the costs and benefits of fighting, as determined by the position of individuals in a dominance hierarchy.

Culture is widely thought to be beneficial when social learning is less costly than individual learning and thus may explain the enormous ecological success of humans. Rogers (1988. Does biology constrain culture. Am. Anthropol. 90: 819-831) contradicted this common view by showing that the evolution of social learning does not necessarily increase the net benefits of learned behaviours in a va...

Within and across species of primates, the number of males in primate groups is correlated with the number of females. This correlation may arise owing to ecological forces operating on females, with subsequent competition among males for access to groups of females. The temporal relationship between changes in male and female group membership remains unexplored in primates and other mammalian ...

A recent study comparing sex ratios produced by experimental evolution in spider mites with those predicted by Hamilton's Local Mate Competition Theory clearly demonstrates Evolutionary Theory's success as a quantitatively predictive science.

Acceptance of an innovation can occur through mutliple exposures to individuals who have already accepted it. Presented here is a model to trace the evolution of an innovation in a social network with a preference λ, amidst topological constraints specified mainly by connectivity, k and population size, Nk. With the interplay between properties of innovation and network structure, the model att...

An interesting problem which has been widely investigated is under what circumstances will a society of rational agents realize some particular stable situations, and whether they satisfy the condition of social efficiency? This will crucially depend on how they interact and what information they have when they interact. For instance, when strategic interactions are modeled as coordination game...

The theory of cooperation predicts that altruism can be established by reciprocity, yet empirical evidence from nature is contentious. Increasingly though, experimental results from social vertebrates challenge the nearly exclusive explanatory power of relatedness for the evolution of cooperation.

The idea of representing knowledge in formal models gets more and more popular. Since these models are understandable and thus processable by machines, the retrieval of knowledge is facilitated. Furthermore, ontology based systems use these models to provide meaningful and semantically enriched data. The success of Web 2.0 approaches has shown, that communities contribute collaboratively their ...

Bacteria are highly social organisms that communicate via signaling molecules, move collectively over surfaces and make biofilm communities. Nonetheless, our main line of defense against pathogenic bacteria consists of antibiotics-drugs that target individual-level traits of bacterial cells and thus, regrettably, select for resistance against their own action. A possible solution lies in target...