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Evolutionary biology

Oh sibling, who art thou?

Nature volume 466, pages 930–931 (2010)Cite this article

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Help from earlier offspring in rearing a subsequent brood should evolve more easily when the mother is strictly monogamous. A comparative study of birds provides evidence in support of this view.

Cooperative breeding, in which more than two individuals combine to rear a single brood of young, has evolved repeatedly in animals, and most commonly in insects and birds. This situation poses an evolutionary paradox: because individuals have only two parents, some of the carers in these cooperative societies are helping to raise young that are not their own. The evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton famously solved part of the puzzle by pointing out that helping to rear siblings can be completely analogous to rearing your own offspring, as both actions facilitate the propagation of your own genes in subsequent generations.

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Figure 1: Monogamy and cooperation.

GEOFFREY DABB

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  1. Andrew Cockburn is in the Division of Evolution, Ecology and Genetics, Research School of Biology, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia. andrew.cockburn@anu.edu.au,

    Andrew Cockburn

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Cockburn, A. Oh sibling, who art thou?. Nature 466, 930–931 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/466930a

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