Intermarriage in Caste Societies

Caste determination through mating in primitively eusocial societies.

Eusocial animal societies are typified by the presence of a helper (worker) caste which predominantly cares for young offspring in a social group while investing little in their own direct reproduction. A key question is what determines whether an individual becomes a worker or leaves to initiate her own reproduction. In some insects, caste is determined nutritionally during development. In oth...

Caste in Itself, Caste and Class, or Caste in Class

A fter the British conquered Bengal and eventually the whole of India, they set out to administer the colony. In this context they encountered two phenomena with which they were not familiar: (1) the relation of people to land for production (and not for revenue receiving, household living, etc.), and (2) the caste system of India, viz. the jati stratifi cation of society. Soon they realized th...

Racial intermarriage pairings.

Most studies of racial intermarriage rely on the prevalence of intermarriage to measure the strength of group boundaries, without scrutinizing the nature of intermarriage pairings. Examination of intermarried couples' characteristics reveals (1) that intermarriages and endogamous marriages follow different patterns, and (2) that intermarriage pairings for some groups reflect a generalized racia...

Ethnic intermarriage in New Zealand

A diapause pathway underlies the gyne phenotype in Polistes wasps, revealing an evolutionary route to caste-containing insect societies.

Colonies of social wasps, ants, and bees are characterized by the production of two phenotypes of female offspring, workers that remain at their natal nest and nonworkers that are potential colony reproductives of the next generation. The phenotype difference includes morphology and is fixed during larval development in ants, honey bees, and some social wasps, all of which represent an advanced...