More than a century ago, William Morton Wheeler proposed that social insect colonies can
be regarded as superorganisms when they have morphologically differentiated reproductive …

Garrett Hardin's tragedy of the commons is an analogy that shows how individuals driven by
self-interest can end up destroying the resource upon which they all depend. The proposed …

The evolution of life on earth has been driven by a small number of major evolutionary
transitions. These transitions have been characterized by individuals that could previously …

Living things are organized in a hierarchy of levels. Genes group together in cells, cells
group together in organisms, and organisms group together in societies. Even different …

The evolution of organismality is a social process. All organisms originated from groups of
simpler units that now show high cooperation among the parts and are nearly free of …

The familiar European hive bee, Apis mellifera, has long dominated honey bee research.
But in the last 15 years, teams in China, Japan, Malaysia, and Thailand began to shift focus …

▪ Abstract Although best known for cooperation, insect societies also manifest many potential
conflicts among individuals. These conflicts involve both direct reproduction by individuals …

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 …

Cooperation occurs at all levels of life, from genomes, complex cells and multicellular
organisms to societies and mutualisms between species. A major question for evolutionary …

In this book, acclaimed economist Herbert Gintis ranges widely across many fields—
including economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, moral philosophy, and biology …