ArticleNature2018
Altruism in a volatile world.
Article in Nature, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 88 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Evolutionary and Ecological Consequences of Cooperation.The American naturalist · 2026Review
- The evolution of cooperative breeding in family groups: when should parents tolerate unhelpful helpers?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Specialism and generalism in social animals in variable environments.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The acceptability of a novel seismocardiography device for measuring VOBMC public health · 2025Article
- Gut microbiota alterations in golden snub-nosed monkeys during food shortage and parturition-nursing periods.Frontiers in microbiology · 2025Article
- Altruism and natural selection in a variable environment.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Complex third-party effects in theProceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Toward greater realism in inclusive fitness models: the case of caste fate conflict in insect societies.Evolution letters · 2024Article
- Molecular patterns and processes in evolving sociality: lessons from insects.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- The ergodicity solution of the cooperation puzzle.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2022Review
- Comparative metagenomics reveals expanded insights into intra- and interspecific variation among wild bee microbiomes.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Prenatal environmental conditions underlie alternative reproductive tactics that drive the formation of a mixed-kin cooperative society.Science advances · 2022Article
- Altruistic bet-hedging and the evolution of cooperation in a Kalahari bird.Science advances · 2021Article
- Social consequences of energetically costly nest construction in a facultatively social bee.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Cooperation among unrelated ant queens provides persistent growth and survival benefits during colony ontogeny.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- An organizing feature of bumble bee life history: worker emergence promotes queen reproduction and survival in young nests.Conservation physiology · 2021Article
- Bet-hedging across generations can affect the evolution of variance-sensitive strategies within generations.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- A continuum of biological adaptations to environmental fluctuation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Social evolution under demographic stochasticity.PLoS computational biology · 2019Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The evolution of altruism-costly self-sacrifice in the service of others-has puzzled biologists since The Origin of Species. For half a century, attempts to understand altruism have developed around the concept that altruists may help relatives to have extra offspring in order to spread shared genes. This theory-known as inclusive fitness-is founded on a simple inequality termed Hamilton's rule. However, explanations of altruism have typically not considered the stochasticity of natural environments, which will not necessarily favour genotypes that produce the greatest average reproductive success. Moreover, empirical data across many taxa reveal associations between altruism and environmental stochasticity, a pattern not predicted by standard interpretations of Hamilton's rule. Here we derive Hamilton's rule with explicit stochasticity, leading to new predictions about the evolution of altruism. We show that altruists can increase the long-term success of their genotype by reducing the temporal variability in the number of offspring produced by their relatives. Consequently, costly altruism can evolve even if it has a net negative effect on the average reproductive success of related recipients. The selective pressure on volatility-suppressing altruism is proportional to the coefficient of variation in population fitness, and is therefore diminished by its own success. Our results formalize the hitherto elusive link between bet-hedging and altruism, and reveal missing fitness effects in the evolution of animal societies.
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Registered trials
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.