Editor's Summary
31 May 2007
Evolving personalities
Although 'personalities' such as boldness, aggressive behaviour and risk avoidance have been shown to exist in more than sixty animal species, from primates to ants, explaining their existence in terms of evolution has been a puzzle. Surely, evolution should not favour the maintenance of different personalities, but rather the convergence towards a single one. In a numerical life-history model, Wolf et al. show that the evolution of animal personalities, defined as consistent sets of behaviours shown in a variety of contexts, is related to an adaptive response to life-history trade-offs. In this model, decisions on trade-offs between current and future reproduction condition the response of individuals to risky situations, and this may be the basis for animal personalities and their maintenance in populations.
News and Views: Evolutionary biology: Animal personalities
That different people differ in their readiness to take risks is an obvious feature of human personality. Theoretical advances now help in making sense of observations of analogous behaviour in animals.
Alison M. Bell
doi:10.1038/447539a
Letter: Life-history trade-offs favour the evolution of animal personalities
Max Wolf, G. Sander van Doorn, Olof Leimar & Franz J. Weissing
doi:10.1038/nature05835
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