Social evolution articles within Nature

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Analysis of population decline shows that frequent disturbances enhance a population’s capacity to resist and recover from downturns and that trade-offs exist when adopting new or alternative land-use strategies.

    • Philip Riris
    • , Fabio Silva
    •  & Xiaolin Ren

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A comparative analysis tests competing evolutionary hypotheses in toothed whales in which menopause has evolved many times as females extended their overall lifespan but not their reproductive lifespan, increasing their opportunity for intergenerational help without increasing intergenerational reproductive competition.

    • Samuel Ellis
    • , Daniel W. Franks
    •  & Darren P. Croft

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Models show that human cooperation cannot evolve reliably under repeated interactions or under intergroup competitions, but combining the two mechanisms predicts a distinctive strategy, observed experimentally in Papua New Guinea, in which individuals exhibit cooperative reciprocity with ingroup partners and uncooperative reciprocity with outgroup partners.

    • Charles Efferson
    • , Helen Bernhard
    •  & Ernst Fehr

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ant pupae secrete a fluid, derived from the moulting fluid, that elicits parental care behaviour, provides nutrients for larvae and must be removed for pupal survival.

    • Orli Snir
    • , Hanan Alwaseem
    •  & Daniel J. C. Kronauer

  • Letter |

    A framework that includes inequality shows that extreme inequality prevents cooperation, but overall welfare is maximized when endowments and productivities are aligned such that more-productive individuals receive higher endowments.

    • Oliver P. Hauser
    • , Christian Hilbe
    •  & Martin A. Nowak

  • Letter |

    Experimental data from, and mathematical modelling of, colonies of the clonal raider ant Ooceraea biroi demonstrate that increases in group size generate division of labour among similar individuals, increased homeostasis and higher colony fitness.

    • Y. Ulrich
    • , J. Saragosti
    •  & D. J. C. Kronauer

  • Letter |

    Cooperation is more likely to evolve in a public-goods-distribution game when payoffs can change between rounds so that the stakes increase when players cooperate and decrease when players defect.

    • Christian Hilbe
    • , Štěpán Šimsa
    •  & Martin A. Nowak

  • Letter |

    Using estimates of metabolic costs of the brain and body, mathematical predictions suggest that the evolution of adult Homo sapiens-sized brains and bodies is driven by ecological rather than social challenges and is perhaps strongly promoted by culture.

    • Mauricio González-Forero
    •  & Andy Gardner

  • Letter |

    A derivation of Hamilton’s rule that considers explicit environmental stochasticity can predict when organisms should pay a cost to influence the variance in the reproductive success of their relatives, formalizing the link between bet-hedging and altruism.

    • Patrick Kennedy
    • , Andrew D. Higginson
    •  & Seirian Sumner

  • Article |

    Parental care in mice evolves through multiple genetic changes; one candidate is vasopressin, the reduced expression of which promotes parental nest-building behaviour in monogamous mice.

    • Andres Bendesky
    • , Young-Mi Kwon
    •  & Hopi E. Hoekstra

  • Letter |

    The authors derive a condition for how natural selection chooses between two competing strategies on any graph for weak selection, elucidating which population structures promote certain behaviours, such as cooperation.

    • Benjamin Allen
    • , Gabor Lippner
    •  & Martin A. Nowak

  • Letter |

    Socially synchronized rhythms in shorebirds were assessed during biparental incubation under natural circumstances and were exceptionally diverse, often not following the 24-h day, whereby risk of predation, not starvation, determined some of the variation in incubation rhythms.

    • Martin Bulla
    • , Mihai Valcu
    •  & Bart Kempenaers

  • Letter |

    The percentage of human deaths caused by interpersonal violence reflects our membership of a particularly violent clade of mammals, although changes in socio-political organization have led to marked variations in this proportion.

    • José María Gómez
    • , Miguel Verdú
    •  & Marcos Méndez

  • Letter |

    In wild Kalahari meerkats (Suricata suricatta), subordinates of both sexes respond to experimentally induced increases in the growth of same-sex rivals by raising their own growth rate and food intake.

    • Elise Huchard
    • , Sinead English
    •  & Tim Clutton-Brock

  • Letter |

    Little is known about cooperative behaviour among the gut microbiota; here, limited cooperation is demonstrated for Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron, but Bacteroides ovatus is found to extracellularly digest a polysaccharide not for its own use, but to cooperatively feed other species such as Bacteroides vulgatus from which it receives return benefits.

    • Seth Rakoff-Nahoum
    • , Kevin R. Foster
    •  & Laurie E. Comstock

  • Letter |

    In human societies, individuals who violate social norms may be punished by third-party observers who have not been harmed by the violator; this study suggests that a reason why the observers are willing to punish is to be seen as more trustworthy by the community.

    • Jillian J. Jordan
    • , Moshe Hoffman
    •  & David G. Rand

  • Letter |

    Using economic games, the authors examine the role of religion in the persistence of human cooperation; individuals who claim that their gods are moralizing, punitive and knowledgeable about human affairs are more likely to play fairly towards geographically distant co-religionists.

    • Benjamin Grant Purzycki
    • , Coren Apicella
    •  & Joseph Henrich

  • Letter |

    By quantifying the colouration of all approximately 6,000 species of passerine birds, certain life-history traits such as large body size and tropical distribution are found to increase ornamentation in both male and female birds, whereas cooperative breeding increases it in females only, and sexual selection diminishes it in females more than it increases it in males.

    • James Dale
    • , Cody J. Dey
    •  & Mihai Valcu

  • Letter |

    Wealth inequality and wealth visibility can potentially affect overall levels of cooperation and economic success, and an online experiment was used to test how these factors interact; wealth inequality by itself did not substantially damage overall cooperation or overall wealth, but making wealth levels visible had a detrimental effect on social welfare.

    • Akihiro Nishi
    • , Hirokazu Shirado
    •  & Nicholas A. Christakis

  • Letter |

    Here, colonies of social spiders are used to investigate the evolution of a group-level trait, the ratio of individuals with the ‘docile’ versus ‘aggressive’ phenotype in a colony; experimental colonies were generated with varying ratios and established in the wild, revealing group-level selection.

    • Jonathan N. Pruitt
    •  & Charles J. Goodnight

  • Letter |

    Relatedness can affect fitness through modulation of intrasexual competition in Drosophila melanogaster; male competition and female harm are lower when three related males compete over an unrelated female than when three unrelated males compete, but when two brothers and an unrelated male compete, the unrelated male sires twice as many offspring as either brother, suggesting that minorities of unrelated competitors may be able to infiltrate coalitions of relatives.

    • Pau Carazo
    • , Cedric K. W. Tan
    •  & Tommaso Pizzari

  • Letter |

    Fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) are socially polymorphic, with some workers tolerating several queens in their colony and others tolerating just one; this study shows that a non-recombining supergene is responsible for this social polymorphism, and the operation of this genomic region is remarkably similar to that of sex chromosomes.

    • John Wang
    • , Yannick Wurm
    •  & Laurent Keller

  • News |

    Ability suggests intelligence evolved to keep track of social interactions in large groups.

    • Jo Marchant

  • Brief Communications Arising |

    • Martin A. Nowak
    • , Corina E. Tarnita
    •  & Edward O. Wilson

  • Comment |

    Biologists studying the evolution of social behaviour are at loggerheads. The disputes — mainly over methods — are holding back the field, says Samir Okasha.

    • Samir Okasha

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