By living in social groups with potential competitors, animals forgo monopolizing access to
resources. Consequently, debate continues over how selection might favour sociality among …

Social species show considerable variation in the extent to which dominant females
suppress subordinate reproduction. Much of this variation may be influenced by the cost of …

Social organisms in many taxa cooperate to produce resources that are shared among
group members. Some cooperatively produced resources may be monopolized by …

Social animal species show considerable variation in the way in which reproduction is
distributed among group members. Recent attempts to explain this variation have proposed …

Cooperative breeding is a type of social system in which some group members (referred to
as 'helpers') routinely provide care for offspring that are not their own, but retain the potential …

Identifying the factors that modulate cooperative and competitive behaviours is the key to
understanding social evolution. However, how ecological factors affect social conflict and …

Evolutionary conflict arises at all levels of biological organization and presents a barrier to
the evolution of cooperation. This barrier can be overcome by mechanisms that reduce the …

The evolution of cooperation in nature and human societies depends crucially on how the
benefits from cooperation are divided and whether individuals have complete information …

Paternity insurance and dominance tenure length are two important components of male
reproductive success, particularly in species where reproduction is highly skewed towards a …

Understanding how social species differentially allocate reproduction within groups is a
major problem in evolutionary biology. A key issue is whether relatedness among nestmates …