ArticleScientific reports2018
Sociality does not drive the evolution of large brains in eusocial African mole-rats.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 56 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Macroevolutionary brain scaling is a microevolutionary metaphenomenon.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The Ear in Subterranean Rodents Revisited: Cochlear Hair-Cell Populations in African Mole-Rats (Bathyergidae).Journal of morphology · 2025Article
- Social fish have larger brains and greater relative telencephalon sizes: support for the social brain hypothesis from wild, intraspecific comparisons.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The genomic consequences and persistence of sociality in spiders.Genome research · 2025Article
- Aggressive interactions influence cognitive performance in Western Australian magpies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Oxygen and the Spark of Human Brain Evolution: Complex Interactions of Metabolism and Cortical Expansion across Development and Evolution.The Neuroscientist : a review journal bringing neurobiology, neurology and psychiatry · 2024Article
- The selfish preen: absence of allopreening in Palaeognathae and its socio-cognitive implications.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Counter-gradient variation and the expensive tissue hypothesis explain parallel brain size reductions at high elevation in cricetid and murid rodents.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Causation, not collinearity: Identifying sources of bias when modelling the evolution of brain size and other allometric traits.Evolution letters · 2022Article
- The evolution of brain neuron numbers in amniotes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- The Loss of Sociality Is Accompanied by Reduced Neural Investment in Mushroom Body Volume in the Sweat BeeAnnals of the Entomological Society of America · 2021Article
- The social network: Neural control of sex differences in reproductive behaviors, motivation, and response to social isolation.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2021Review
- Brain size and neuron numbers drive differences in yawn duration across mammals and birds.Communications biology · 2021Article
- Individual and age-related variation of cellular brain composition in a squamate reptile.Biology letters · 2020Article
- Whole-Brain Profiling of Cells and Circuits in Mammals by Tissue Clearing and Light-Sheet Microscopy.Neuron · 2020Review
- The evolution of brain structure captured in stereotyped cell count and cell type distributions.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2020Review
- Article
- A framework for conceptualizing dimensions of social organization in mammals.Ecology and evolution · 2020Article
- Brain structure differences between solitary and social wasp species are independent of body size allometry.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 5 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The social brain hypothesis (SBH) posits that the demands imposed on individuals by living in cohesive social groups exert a selection pressure favouring the evolution of large brains and complex cognitive abilities. Using volumetry and the isotropic fractionator to determine the size of and numbers of neurons in specific brain regions, here we test this hypothesis in African mole-rats (Bathyergidae). These subterranean rodents exhibit a broad spectrum of social complexity, ranging from strictly solitary through to eusocial cooperative breeders, but feature similar ecologies and life history traits. We found no positive association between sociality and neuroanatomical correlates of information-processing capacity. Solitary species are larger, tend to have greater absolute brain size and have more neurons in the forebrain than social species. The neocortex ratio and neuronal counts correlate negatively with social group size. These results are clearly inconsistent with the SBH and show that the challenges coupled with sociality in this group of rodents do not require brain enlargement or fundamental reorganization. These findings suggest that group living or pair bonding per se does not select strongly for brain enlargement unless coupled with Machiavellian interactions affecting individual fitness.
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