NATURAL SELECTION AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR

Natural Neural Projection Dynamics Underlying Social Behavior

Social interaction is a complex behavior essential for many species and is impaired in major neuropsychiatric disorders. Pharmacological studies have implicated certain neurotransmitter systems in social behavior, but circuit-level understanding of endogenous neural activity during social interaction is lacking. We therefore developed and applied a new methodology, termed fiber photometry, to o...

Pro-social behavior in a natural setting

Empirical evidence is provided for the importance of pro-social behavior of individuals in an anonymous, n-person public good setting. A unique panel data set of 136,000 observations is matched with an extensive survey. Even under anonymous conditions, a large number of individuals are prepared to donate quite a significant sum of money. Cooperation conditional on giving by specific other perso...

Evolution of social behavior through interpopulation selection.

Under certain special conditions natural selection can be effective at the level of local populations, or demes. Such interpopulation selection will favor genotypes that reduce the probability of extinction of their parent population even at the cost of a lowered inclusive fitness. Such genotypes may be characterized by altruistic traits only in a viscous population, i.e., in a population in wh...

Natural History and Social Behavior in Neotropical Pseudoscorpions

Evolution of Social Behavior: Individual and Group Selection

If we were told that a man lived a long and prosperous life in the world of Chicago gangsters, we would be entitled to make some guesses as to the sort of man he was . . . . Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world . . . . If you look at the way natural selection works, it seems to follow that anything that ha...