BACKGROUND Whereas early studies of animal evolution focused principally on the
adaptations of different species to their physical environment, more recent studies have …

From an evolutionary perspective, social behaviours are those which have fitness
consequences for both the individual that performs the behaviour, and another individual …

The book aims to integrate our understanding of mammalian societies into a novel synthesis
that is relevant to behavioural ecologists, ecologists, and anthropologists. It adopts a …

Natural selection favours genes that increase an organism's ability to survive and reproduce.
This would appear to lead to a world dominated by selfish behaviour. However, cooperation …

Darwin developed the theory of sexual selection to account for the evolution of weaponry,
ornamentation and other secondary sexual characters that are commonly more developed …

Metrics derived from pedigrees are key to investigating several major issues in evolutionary
biology, including the quantitative genetic architecture of traits, inbreeding depression, and …

In many animal societies, dominant individuals monopolize reproduction, but the tactics they
employ to achieve this are poorly understood. One possibility is that aggressive dominants …

In most animals, the sex that invests least in its offspring competes more intensely for access
to the opposite sex and shows greater development of secondary sexual characters than the …

Spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) are large mammalian carnivores, but their societies,
called 'clans', resemble those of such cercopithecine primates as baboons and macaques …

Cooperation occurs at all levels of life, from genomes, complex cells and multicellular
organisms to societies and mutualisms between species. A major question for evolutionary …