From individual control to majority rule: extending transactional models of reproductive skew in animal societies

Transactional concession models of social evolution explain the reproductive skew within groups by assuming that a dominant individual completely controls the allocation of reproduction to other group members. The models predict when the dominant will benefit from donating parcels of reproduction to...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the Royal Society. B, Biological sciences Biological sciences, 2003-05, Vol.270 (1519), p.1041-1045
Main Authors: Reeve, H. K., Jeanne, R. L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Behavior modeling
Behavior, Animal - physiology
Cooperation
Dominance
Germ cells
Insect colonies
Insect reproduction
Kin Selection
Linear programming
Modeling
Models, Biological
Queen insects
Reproduction
Reproductive Skew
Social Behavior
Social evolution
Social insects
Somatic cells
Staying Incentives
Worker Policing
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Summary:Transactional concession models of social evolution explain the reproductive skew within groups by assuming that a dominant individual completely controls the allocation of reproduction to other group members. The models predict when the dominant will benefit from donating parcels of reproduction to other members in return for peaceful cooperation. Using linear programming methods, we present a 'majority-rules' model in which the summed actions of all society members, each with equal power, completely determine the reproductive share of any single member. The majority-rules model predicts that, despite the diffusion of power, a 'virtual dominant' (a dominant lacking special behavioural power) will emerge and that the reproductive skew will be exactly that predicted if the virtual dominant were to control completely the group's reproductive partitioning. The virtual dominant is the individual to which group members have the maximum average genetic relatedness. This result greatly broadens the applicability of transactional models of reproductive skew to social groups of any size, such as large-colony eusocial insects, and explains why queens in such colonies can achieve reproductive domination without any behavioural enforcement. Moreover, the majority-rules model unifies transactional-skew theory with models of worker policing and even generates a new theory for the cooperation among somatic cells in a multicellular organism.
ISSN:0962-8452
1471-2954
DOI:10.1098/rspb.2002.2253