Social evolution articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Queen pheromones are used by eusocial insects to regulate all aspects of colony life. Here, Holman et al. compare the effects of queen pheromone on gene expression and splicing in four eusocial insect species, giving insight into the mechanism and evolution of division of reproductive labour.

    • Luke Holman
    • , Heikki Helanterä
    •  & Alexander S. Mikheyev

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sociality explains substantial variation in ageing across species, but less is known about this relationship within species. Here, the authors show that female dominant Seychelles warblers with helpers at the nest have higher late-life survival and lower telomere attrition and the probability of having helpers increases with age.

    • Martijn Hammers
    • , Sjouke A. Kingma
    •  & David S. Richardson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sexual selection is expected to be intensified in non-monogamous mating systems; in birds this might accelerate song evolution. Here, the authors show that across songbirds, polygyny and extra-pair paternity are associated with faster syllable repertoire size evolution and smaller repertoire size, respectively.

    • Kate T. Snyder
    •  & Nicole Creanza

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Group membership can inform individuals’ decisions on whether to cooperate. Here, the authors show how cooperative groups themselves can emerge and change due to use of reputation heuristics (such as “the enemy of a friend is an enemy”), and how this destabilizes cooperation over time.

    • Jörg Gross
    •  & Carsten K. W. De Dreu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The halictid bee Lasioglossum albipes has both solitary and eusocial individuals, making it a model for social evolution. Here, Kocher et al. identify a genetic variation associated with this social polymorphism, including a variant that can regulate the expression of an autism-associated gene, syntaxin 1a.

    • Sarah D. Kocher
    • , Ricardo Mallarino
    •  & Naomi E. Pierce

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There is some evidence that social context can mediate the progression of cancers. Here, the authors show that Drosophila flies housed in social isolation experienced faster cancer tumor progression than flies in groups, and that flies select for social environments that minimize cancer risk.

    • Erika H. Dawson
    • , Tiphaine P. M. Bailly
    •  & Frederic Mery

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Development may be plastic and influenced by parental care. Here, the authors show that experimental reduction of maternal care in the small carpenter bee leads to extensive changes in gene expression and splicing, minor changes in methylation, and greater offspring aggression and social avoidance.

    • Samuel V. Arsenault
    • , Brendan G. Hunt
    •  & Sandra M. Rehan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The decoy effect refers to the fact that the presence of a third option can shift people’s preferences between two other options even though the third option is inferior to both. Here, the authors show how the decoy effect can enhance cooperation in a social dilemma, the repeated prisoner’s dilemma.

    • Zhen Wang
    • , Marko Jusup
    •  & Stefano Boccaletti

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The evolution of cooperation depends on social structure, which may evolve in response. Here, Akçay models coevolution between cooperation and social network formation strategies, showing that coevolutionary feedbacks lead cooperation to collapse unless constrained by costs of social connections.

    • Erol Akçay

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Strong positive and strong negative reciprocators reward cooperation and punish defection, respectively, regardless of future benefits. Here, Weber and colleagues demonstrate that dispositions towards strong positive and strong negative reciprocity are not correlated within individuals.

    • Till O. Weber
    • , Ori Weisel
    •  & Simon Gächter

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans are known to use social heuristics to make intuitive decisions on whether to cooperate. Here, the authors show with evolutionary simulations that social heuristics can be an adaptive solution to uncertainties about the consequences of cooperation and can greatly increase cooperation levels.

    • Pieter van den Berg
    •  & Tom Wenseleers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Plants can recognize nearby kin and alter their growth in response. Here, Torices et al. demonstrate that flower production can also be sensitive to social context, with plants producing larger floral displays in the presence of relatives, which may increase attraction of pollinators to the group.

    • Rubén Torices
    • , José M. Gómez
    •  & John R. Pannell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How do social insect colonies regulate tasks after the developmental stage and in response to changing environments? Here, Crall et al. use automated individual tracking to reveal that task switching after a major colony disturbance helps to maintain collective foraging performance in bumble bees.

    • James D. Crall
    • , Nick Gravish
    •  & Stacey A. Combes

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Live birth may be a precursor for parent-offspring associations and subsequent sociality, but the ubiquity of live birth in mammals and parental care in birds precludes testing the relationship in those clades. Here the authors show that live birth, but not egg attendance, is associated with the evolution of social grouping in squamate reptiles.

    • Ben Halliwell
    • , Tobias Uller
    •  & Geoffrey M. While

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Heterogeneous complex networks tend to be a more realistic representation of social networks than homogenous ones. Here Kleineberg investigates the role of network heterogeneity in the emergence of cooperation in social dilemmas and shows that it can sometimes hinder it.

    • Kaj-Kolja Kleineberg

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Microbes live in communities and exchange metabolites, but the resulting dynamics are poorly understood. Here, the authors study the interplay between metabolite production strategies and population dynamics, and find that complex and unexpected dynamics emerge even in simple microbial economies.

    • Yoav Kallus
    • , John H. Miller
    •  & Eric Libby

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Punishment by peers can enforce social norms, such as contributing to a public good. Here, Abbink and colleagues show that individuals will enforce norms even when contributions reduce the net benefit of the group, resulting in the maintenance of wasteful contributions.

    • Klaus Abbink
    • , Lata Gangadharan
    •  & John Thrasher

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Lab strains of Pseudomonas are model systems for the evolution of cooperation over public goods (iron-scavenging siderophores). Here, Butaitė et al. add ecological and evolutionary insight into this system by showing that cheating and resistance to cheating both shape competition for iron in natural Pseudomonas communities.

    • Elena Butaitė
    • , Michael Baumgartner
    •  & Rolf Kümmerli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Multicellularity can arise by cells aggregating or remaining connected after cell division. Here, Driscoll and Travisano show that both mechanisms operate in experimentally evolved strains of the yeastKluyveromyces lactis, with transient aggregation facilitating the coexistence of unicellular and multicellular genotypes.

    • William W Driscoll
    •  & Michael Travisano

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Groups of animals tend to solve tasks better than individuals, but it is unclear whether such socially-derived knowledge accumulates over time. Sasaki and Biro demonstrate that homing pigeon flocks progressively improve the efficiency of their routes by culturally accumulating knowledge across generations.

    • Takao Sasaki
    •  & Dora Biro

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Proximity to criticality can be advantageous under changing conditions, but it also entails reduced robustness. Here, the authors analyse fight sizes in a macaque society and find not only that it sits near criticality, but also that the distance from the critical point is tunable through adjustment of individual behaviour and social conflict management.

    • Bryan C. Daniels
    • , David C. Krakauer
    •  & Jessica C. Flack

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Parental care involves shifts in numerous behaviours related to mating, feeding, aggression and social interaction. Here, the authors show that, in burying beetles, parenting is associated with increased levels of neuropeptides known to mediate these precursor behaviours, suggesting co-option of existing genetic pathways.

    • Christopher B. Cunningham
    • , Majors J. Badgett
    •  & Allen J. Moore

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cooperation can be stabilized against exploitation if cooperators can reliably recognize each other. Here, Gruenheit and colleagues show that different alleles of the Tgr locus of the social amoebaDictyostelium discoideumunderlie the ability of different strains to recognize and cooperate with socially compatible individuals.

    • Nicole Gruenheit
    • , Katie Parkinson
    •  & Christopher R. L. Thompson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In cooperatively breeding species, subordinates help to raise the dominant breeders’ offspring in return for benefits associated with group membership. Here, Grinsted and Field show that the amount of help provided by subordinate paper wasps depends on the availability of alternative nesting options, as predicted by biological market theory.

    • Lena Grinsted
    •  & Jeremy Field

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Chimpanzees appear helpful in some studies yet they do not usually share food, suggesting that they are prosocial when costs are low and goals are clear. Here, Tennie et al. show that chimpanzee helping behaviour might be a byproduct of task design and that these apes might not be as prosocial as supposed.

    • Claudio Tennie
    • , Keith Jensen
    •  & Josep Call

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Lab experiments have shown that people will punish violators of social norms, with the severity of punishment increasing with the degree of violation. Here, Balafoutas et al. show that, outside of the lab, larger violations are not punished more severely and are associated with a greater risk of reprisal.

    • Loukas Balafoutas
    • , Nikos Nikiforakis
    •  & Bettina Rockenbach

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Non-parental helpers contribute to offspring care in many species; however, the amount of care provided varies considerably across species. Here, Green et al. perform a phylogenetic comparative analysis of helping behavior in 36 cooperatively-breeding bird species and find that helper effort increases with relatedness to the recipient of care.

    • Jonathan P. Green
    • , Robert P. Freckleton
    •  & Ben J. Hatchwell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cooperation requires individuals to sacrifice individual rewards for group benefits. Here, Grimalda, Pondorfer and Tracer show in a foraging society of Papua New Guinea that social image building is a more powerful motivator of social cooperation than altruistic punishment.

    • Gianluca Grimalda
    • , Andreas Pondorfer
    •  & David P. Tracer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In honeybees, pheromones produced by the queen inhibit reproduction by workers and enforce a eusocial division of labour. Here, Duncan, Hyink and Dearden show that this inhibition is mediated by the Notch signalling pathway in the workers' ovaries.

    • Elizabeth J. Duncan
    • , Otto Hyink
    •  & Peter K. Dearden

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social networks have important implications to a variety of ecological and evolutionary processes. Here, Ilany and Akçay develop a social network model and show that inheritance of social contacts leads to networks with properties observed in species such as sleepy lizards and spotted hyenas.

    • Amiyaal Ilany
    •  & Erol Akçay

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The burying beetle shows flexible parenting behaviour. Here, the authors show that offspring fare equally well regardless of the sex or number of parents present and find similar gene expression profiles in uniparental and biparental females and in uniparental males, which suggests no specialization in parenting.

    • Darren J. Parker
    • , Christopher B. Cunningham
    •  & Allen J. Moore

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Our understanding of how humans produce complex technologies is limited. Here, the authors use a computer-based experiment to show that the production of complex innovations results from a population process that relies on efficient social learning mechanisms and specific population structures.

    • Maxime Derex
    •  & Robert Boyd

  • Article |

    How animals distinguish family members from unrelated conspecifics is not fully understood. Here Levréro et al.show that although the structure of mandrill vocalisations can be modulated by their social environment, it still contains information that may be used to recognise unfamiliar relatives.

    • F. Levréro
    • , G. Carrete-Vega
    •  & M.J.E. Charpentier

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Contemporary hunter-gatherers share food in a cooperative behaviour called demand sharing. Here the authors show that populations of demand sharers who move freely between camps survive in the unpredictable environments typical of hunter-gatherers, while sedentary and non-sharing families die out.

    • Hannah M. Lewis
    • , Lucio Vinicius
    •  & Andrea Bamberg Migliano

  • Article |

    It is generally assumed that a person’s cooperative behaviour is consistent, but direct evidence is lacking. Here, the authors show consistent patterns of an individual’s behaviour both in different cooperation games and through time, suggesting that an individual's cooperative behaviour is general and stable.

    • Alexander Peysakhovich
    • , Martin A. Nowak
    •  & David G. Rand

  • Article |

    The evolutionary foundation of human prosociality remains poorly understood. Here, the authors show that extensive allomaternal care is the best predictor of prosocial behaviour among 15 primate species, including humans, which suggests that prosocial motivations arise along with cooperative breeding.

    • J. M. Burkart
    • , O. Allon
    •  & C. P. van Schaik

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Theory predicts that extortioners, individuals that obtain advantages through forces and threats, can outperform any generous co-player. Here, Hilbe et al.show experimentally that humans punish extortion by refusing to cooperate, which reduces the extortioner’s gains, and suggest that generosity is more profitable in the long run.

    • Christian Hilbe
    • , Torsten Röhl
    •  & Manfred Milinski

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although termites are major human pests, they have an important role in maintaining ecosystem function and biodiversity. Here, the authors sequence the genome and transcriptomes of a dampwood termite and highlight genes that may be involved in the mechanisms underlying insect social behaviour.

    • Nicolas Terrapon
    • , Cai Li
    •  & Jürgen Liebig

  • Article |

    Whether or not intuition favours cooperative decision making has been controversial. Rand et al.carry out a meta-analysis of 15 studies involving volunteers playing economic games, and confirm a role for intuition in cooperation, which varies according to the volunteers’ previous experience with similar games.

    • David G. Rand
    • , Alexander Peysakhovich
    •  & Joshua D. Greene

  • Article |

    Social behaviours such as altruism and spite are widespread in nature but the conditions that promote their evolution remain elusive. Here, Débarreet al. derive a model that captures general conditions for the evolution of social behaviour, which reveals the critical role of the scale of competition.

    • F. Débarre
    • , C. Hauert
    •  & M. Doebeli

  • Article |

    It is unclear how interactions between individual genomes affect behaviour and survival in social organisms. Here, Teseo et al. show that genomic interactions between larvae and nursing adults of the clonal ant Cerapachys biroidetermine the proportion of individuals involved in reproduction or cooperation.

    • Serafino Teseo
    • , Nicolas Châline
    •  & Daniel J.C. Kronauer

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