POST-MORTEM DELIVERY. By V. Richakd3, Esq., Civil Surgeon, Balasore. The body of a female named Surji, aged 34 years, of the Grhokha caste, was sent to the civil station for examination. The police report stated, that as the woman was pregnant by her paramour, she committed suicide by hanging herself. When the body, which had been four days on the road, arrived at the dead-house, it was much de...

We experimentally investigate in village India how belief systems that hierarchize social groups affect the groups’ responses to economic opportunities. Earlier we found that making caste salient hurt low caste performance both absolutely and relative to the high caste’s. To examine the possible role of mistrust, we manipulate the scope for discretion in rewarding performance. When offered a ga...

Recent evidence for genetic effects on royal and worker caste differentiation from diverse social insect taxa has put an end to the view that these phenotypes stem solely from a developmental switch controlled by environmental factors. Instead, the relative influences of genotypic and environmental effects on caste vary among species, ranging from largely environmentally controlled phenotypes t...

One of the most appealing features of multiagent technology is its natural way to modularise a complex system in terms of multiple, interacting and autonomous components. As a natural extension of classes, castes introduced in the formal specification language SLAB provide a language facility that provides modularity in the formal specification of multiagent systems. A caste represents a set of...

The presence of reproductively altruistic castes is one of the primary traits of the eusocial societies. Adaptation and regulation of the sterile caste, to a certain extent, drives the evolution of eusociality. Depending on adaptive functions of the first evolved sterile caste, eusocial societies can be categorized into the worker-first and soldier-first lineages, respectively. The former is ma...

In some of the most complex animal societies, individuals exhibit a cooperative division of labour to form castes. The most pronounced types of caste formation involve reproductive and non-reproductive forms that are morphologically distinct. In colonies comprising separate or mobile individuals, this type of caste formation has been recognized only among the arthropods, sea anemones and mole-r...

Caste plasticity is a hallmark of social insects. However, maternal effects that limit the caste of eggs may be more widespread than previously appreciated, and can have some odd consequences.

Elaborate division of labour has contributed significantly to the ecological success of social insects. Division of labour is achieved either by behavioural task specialization or by morphological specialization of colony members. In physical caste systems, the diet and rearing environment of developing larvae is known to determine the phenotype of adult individuals, but recent studies have sho...

In this paper, we propose an adaptive casteship mechanism for modelling and designing adaptive Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). In our approach, caste is the modular unit and abstraction that specify agents’ behaviour. Adaptive behaviours of agents are captured as the change of castes during their lifecycles by executing ‘join’, ‘quit’, ‘activate’ and ‘deactivate’ operations on castes. The formal sem...

The necessity of a methodology for developing multi-agent systems (MAS) has been widely recognized due to the difficulties in analysis, specification, design, implementation and testing the autonomous and collaborative behaviours of such systems. This paper presents CAMLE – a caste-centric agent modeling language and environment. The methodology underlying the language and environment is based ...