Social evolution articles within Nature Communications

Featured

• Article
  14 November 2013 | Open Access

  Quality versus quantity of social ties in experimental cooperative networks

  The effect of the rate of forming and breaking social ties on cooperative behaviour is not clear. Here the authors experimentally test the effect of rewiring the connections between individuals, and find that optimal levels of cooperation are achieved at intermediate levels of change in ties.

  • Hirokazu Shirado
  • , Feng Fu
  •  & Nicholas A. Christakis

• Article | 11 November 2013

  Adaptive response to sociality and ecology drives the diversification of facial colour patterns in catarrhines

  Animal colouration is the product of competing selection pressures. Here the authors analyse the diversity of facial colouration in Old World monkeys and apes, and find that colour patterns are linked to social factors, whereas the different levels of facial pigmentation arise as a result of ecological pressures.

  • Sharlene E. Santana
  • , Jessica Lynch Alfaro
  •  & Michael E. Alfaro

• Article | 08 November 2013

  Morphological and genetic evidence for early Holocene cattle management in northeastern China

  The domestication of cattle took place during the early Holocene, independently in the Near East and in southern Asia. Here, Zhang et al.provide evidence for management of taurine cattle in northern China, an area not previously considered as an independent domestication centre.

  • Hucai Zhang
  • , Johanna L.A. Paijmans
  •  & Michael Hofreiter

• Article
  03 October 2013 | Open Access

  Resource heterogeneity can facilitate cooperation

  Differences in resource availability or inequality of wealth are common both in nature and in human societies. Here the authors find that such inequality facilitates cooperation when the generation of public goods is inefficient, but hinders cooperation when the efficiency of joint actions is high.

  • Ádám Kun
  •  & Ulf Dieckmann

• Article | 18 September 2013

  Group performance is maximized by hierarchical competence distribution

  Social groups often need to take decisions and solve problems together, with each member contributing to the solution in a different way. Zafeiris et al.provide a family of models that allow the definition of the ideal distribution of competences in a group to solve a given task.

  • Anna Zafeiris
  •  & Tamás Vicsek

• Article | 06 June 2012

  Unfavourable environment limits social conflict in Yuhina brunneiceps

  Ecological factors impact cooperative and competitive behaviour, creating social conflict. Here, predictions from a game-theory model together with observations of Taiwan yuhinas—a joint-nesting species where group members are unrelated—show that these birds are more cooperative in unfavourable environmental conditions.

  • Sheng-Feng Shen
  • , Sandra L. Vehrencamp
  •  & Hsiao-Wei Yuan

• Article | 16 August 2011

  The evolution of antisocial punishment in optional public goods games

  Antisocial punishment, where non-cooperators punish cooperators, is a puzzling empirical phenomenon missing from most theoretical models. Here, antisocial punishment is added to an optional public goods game, revealing that evolution favours antisocial punishment and punishment does not promote cooperation.

  • David G. Rand
  •  & Martin A. Nowak

• Article | 19 July 2011

  Monogamy and haplodiploidy act in synergy to promote the evolution of eusociality

  Why some species have evolved to produce sterile individuals working for the benefit of others has yet to be fully explained. Now, a mathematical model of the dynamics of insect colony foundation, growth and death shows that monogamy and haplodiploidy facilitate the evolution of this societal structure.

  • Lutz Fromhage
  •  & Hanna Kokko