ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
Models of social evolution: can we do better to predict 'who helps whom to achieve what'?
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 27 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sex-biased cooperation among immature peers: it matters who helps whom.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Role specialization and reproductive division of labour at the origin of eusociality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Anthropological Prosociality via Sub-Group Level Selection.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2022Article
- Cooperative interactions among females can lead to even more extraordinary sex ratios.Evolution letters · 2021Article
- A model of the evolution of equitable offers in n-person dictator games with interbirth intervals.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Cooperative partner choice in multi-level male dolphin alliances.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- The consequences of switching strategies in a two-player iterated survival game.Journal of mathematical biology · 2021Article
- The evolution of early-life effects on social behaviour-why should social adversity carry over to the future?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Article
- Correlated pay-offs are key to cooperation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
- The evolution of cooperation based on direct fitness benefits.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Effects of load-lightening and delayed extrapair benefits on the fitness consequences of helping behavior.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Models of social evolution and the evolution of helping have been classified in numerous ways. Two categorical differences have, however, escaped attention in the field. Models tend not to justify why they use a particular assumption structure about who helps whom: a large number of authors model peer-to-peer cooperation of essentially identical individuals, probably for reasons of mathematical convenience; others are inspired by particular cooperatively breeding species, and tend to assume unidirectional help where subordinates help a dominant breed more efficiently. Choices regarding what the help achieves (i.e. which life-history trait of the helped individual is improved) are similarly made without much comment: fecundity benefits are much more commonly modelled than survival enhancements, despite evidence that these may interact when the helped individual can perform life-history reallocations (load-lightening and related phenomena). We review our current theoretical understanding of effects revealed when explicitly asking 'who helps whom to achieve what', from models of mutual aid in partnerships to the very few models that explicitly contrast the strength of selection to help enhance another individual's fecundity or survival. As a result of idiosyncratic modelling choices in contemporary literature, including the varying degree to which demographic consequences are made explicit, there is surprisingly little agreement on what types of help are predicted to evolve most easily. We outline promising future directions to fill this gap.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.