ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2013
Constraints and flexibility in mammalian social behaviour: introduction and synthesis.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
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43 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Did Down-Regulated Instincts Enable Human Gene-Culture Coevolution?Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
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- The Secret Family Life of a Group of Golden Jackals on Samos, Greece.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Facilitation of Evolution by Plasticity Scales with Phenotypic Complexity.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Egalitarian cooperation linked to central oxytocin levels in communal breeding house mice.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Interspecific variation in cooperative burrowing behavior byEvolution letters · 2022Article
- Social complexity as a driving force of gut microbiota exchange among conspecific hosts in non-human primates.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2022Review
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- Epigenomics and gene regulation in mammalian social systems.Current zoology · 2020Article
- A framework for conceptualizing dimensions of social organization in mammals.Ecology and evolution · 2020Article
- Why intergroup variation matters for understanding behaviour.Biology letters · 2019Article
- All-Male Groups in Asian Elephants: A Novel, Adaptive Social Strategy in Increasingly Anthropogenic Landscapes of Southern India.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Facial Complexity in Sun Bears: Exact Facial Mimicry and Social Sensitivity.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Population-specific social dynamics in chimpanzees.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Ecology and social system of northern gibbons living in cold seasonal forests.Zoological research · 2018Review
- Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
This paper introduces a Theme Issue presenting the latest developments in research on the interplay between flexibility and constraint in social behaviour, using comparative datasets, long-term field studies and experimental data from both field and laboratory studies of mammals. We first explain our focus on mammals and outline the main components of their social systems, focusing on variation within- and among-species in numerous aspects of social organization, mating system and social structure. We then review the current state of primarily ultimate explanations of this diversity in social behaviour. We approach the question of how and why the balance between behavioural flexibility and continuity is achieved by discussing the genetic, developmental, ecological and social constraints on hypothetically unlimited behavioural flexibility. We introduce the other contributions to this Theme Issue against this background and conclude that constraints are often crucial to the evolution and expression of behavioural flexibility. In exploring these issues, the enduring relevance of Tinbergen's seminal paper 'On aims and methods in ethology', with its advocacy of an integrative, four-pronged approach to studying behaviour becomes apparent: an exceptionally fitting tribute on the 50th anniversary of its publication.
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