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An exploration of the biological roots of positive social behavior reveals how human genes have countered violence and self-interest with equally inherent, society-building tendencies toward friendship, cooperation, and learning.

InThe Hadza, Frank Marlowe provides a quantitative ethnography of one of the last remaining societies of hunter-gatherers in the world. The Hadza, who inhabit an area of East Africa near the Serengeti and Olduvai Gorge, have long drawn the attention of anthropologists and archaeologists for maintaining a foraging lifestyle in a region that is key to understanding human origins. Marlowe ably applies his years of research with the Hadza to cover the traditional topics in ethnography-subsistence, material culture, religion, and social structure. But the book's unique contribution is to introduce readers to the more contemporary field of behavioral ecology, which attempts to understand human behavior from an evolutionary perspective. To that end,The Hadzaalso articulates the necessary background for readers whose exposure to human evolutionary theory is minimal.

Interference with public good cooperation provides a promising novel antimicrobial strategy since social evolution theory predicts that resistant mutants will be counter-selected if they share the public benefits of their resistance with sensitive cells in the population. Although this hypothesis is supported by a limited number of pioneering studies, an extensive body of more fundamental work on social evolution describes a multitude of mechanisms and conditions that can stabilize public behaviour, thus potentially allowing resistant mutants to thrive. In this paper we theorize on how these different mechanisms can influence the evolution of resistance against public good inhibitors. Based hereon, we propose an innovative 5-step screening strategy to identify novel evolution-proof public good inhibitors, which involves a systematic evaluation of the exploitability of public goods under the most relevant experimental conditions, as well as a careful assessment of the most optimal way to interfere with their action. Overall, this opinion paper is aimed to contribute to long-term solutions to fight bacterial infections.

Queen pheromones are chemical signals that mediate reproductive division of labor in eusocial animals. Remarkably, queen pheromones are composed of identical or chemically similar compounds in some ants, wasps and bees, even though these taxa diverged >150MYA and evolved queens and workers independently. Here, we measure the transcriptomic consequences of experimental exposure to queen pheromones in workers from two ant and two bee species (genera: Lasius , Apis , Bombus ), and test whether they are similar across species. Queen pheromone exposure affected transcription and splicing at many loci. Many genes responded consistently in multiple species, and the set of pheromone-sensitive genes was enriched for functions relating to lipid biosynthesis and transport, olfaction, production of cuticle, oogenesis, and histone (de)acetylation. Pheromone-sensitive genes tend to be evolutionarily ancient, positively selected, peripheral in the gene coexpression network, hypomethylated, and caste-specific in their expression. Our results reveal how queen pheromones achieve their effects, and suggest that ants and bees use similar genetic modules to achieve reproductive division of labor. Queen pheromones are used by eusocial insects to regulate all aspects of colony life. Here, Holman et al. compare the effects of queen pheromone on gene expression and splicing in four eusocial insect species, giving insight into the mechanism and evolution of division of reproductive labour.

\"This book is about the irreducibility of human evolution to purely biological properties and processes, for human evolution has incorporated the emergence of social relations and cultural histories that are unprecedented in the apes. Human evolution over the last few million years has involved the transformation from biological evolution into biocultural evolution. For several million years, human intelligence, dexterity, and technology all co-evolved with one another, although the first two are organic properties and the last is inorganic. Over the last few tens of thousands of years, the development of new social roles - notably, spouse, father, in-laws, and grandparents - have been combined with new technologies and symbolic meanings to produce the familiar human species. This leads to a fundamental evolutionary understanding of humans as biocultural ex-apes; reducible neither to an imaginary cultureless biological core, nor to our ancestry as apes. Consequently, there can be no 'natural history' of the human condition, or the human organism, which is not a 'natural/cultural history'.\"--Provided by publisher.

Supergene regions maintain alleles of multiple genes in tight linkage through suppressed recombination. Despite their importance in determining complex phenotypes, our empirical understanding of early supergene evolution is limited. Here we focus on the young ‘social’ supergene of fire ants, a powerful system for disentangling the effects of evolutionary antagonism and suppressed recombination. We hypothesize that gene degeneration and social antagonism shaped the evolution of the fire ant supergene, resulting in distinct patterns of gene expression. We test these ideas by identifying allelic differences between supergene variants, characterizing allelic expression across populations, castes and body parts, and contrasting allelic expression biases with differences in expression between social forms. We find strong signatures of gene degeneration and gene-specific dosage compensation. On this background, a small portion of the genes has the signature of adaptive responses to evolutionary antagonism between social forms. Red fire ants ( Solenopsis invicta ) are native to South America, but the species has spread to North America, Australia and New Zealand where it can be an invasive pest. A reason for this species’ invasiveness types of colonies : one with a single egg-laying queen and another with several queens. However, it is not possible to simply add more queens to a colony with one queen. Instead, the number of queens in a colony is controlled genetically, by a chromosome known as the ‘social chromosome’. Like many other animals, red fire ants are diploid: their cells have two copies of each chromosome, which can carry two different versions of each gene. The social chromosome is no different, and it comes in two variants, SB and Sb. Each ant can therefore have either two SB chromosomes, leading to a colony with a single queen; or one SB chromosome and one Sb chromosome, leading to a colony with multiple queens. Ants with two copies of the Sb variant die when they are young, so the Sb version is inherited in a similar way to how the Y chromosome is passed on in humans. However, the social chromosome in red fire ants appeared less than one million years ago, making it much younger than the human Y chromosome, which is 180 million years old. This makes the social chromosome a good candidate for examining the early evolution of special chromosome variants that are only inherited. How differences between the SB and the Sb chromosomes are evolving is an open question, however. Perhaps each version of the social chromosome has been optimised through natural selection to one colony type. Another suggestion is that the Sb chromosome has degenerated over time because its genes cannot be ‘reshuffled’ as they would be on normal chromosomes. Martinez-Ruiz et al. compared genetic variants on the SB and Sb chromosomes, along with their expression in different types of ant colonies. The analysis showed that the Sb variant is in fact breaking down because of the lack of gene shuffling. This loss is compensated by intact copies of the same genes found on the SB variant, which explains why ants with the Sb variant can only survive if they also carry the SB version. Only a handful of genes on the social chromosomes appear to have been optimised by natural selection. Therefore Martinez-Ruiz et al. concluded the differences between the two chromosomes that lead to different colony types are collateral effects of Sb’s inability to reshuffle its genes. This work reveals how a special chromosome similar to the Y chromosome in humans evolved. It also shows how multiple complex evolutionary forces can shape a species’ genetic makeup and social forms.

Multilevel societies are unique in their ability to facilitate the maintenance of strong and consistent social bonds among some individuals while allowing separation among others, which may be especially important when social and sexual bonds carry significant and reliable benefits to individuals within social groups. Here we examine the importance of social and sexual bonds in the multilevel society of hamadryas baboons ( Papio hamadryas ) and apply these principles to social evolution in Plio-Pleistocene hominins. The behavior, adaptations, and socioecology of baboons ( Papio spp.) have long been recognized as providing an important comparative sample to elucidate the processes of human evolution, and the social system of hamadryas baboons in particular shares even more similarities with humans than that of other baboons. Here we draw parallels between processes during the evolution of hamadryas social organization and those characterizing late Pliocene or early Pleistocene hominins, most likely Homo erectus . The higher costs of reproduction faced by female Homo erectus , exacerbated by an increased reliance on difficult to acquire, nutrient-dense foods, are commonly thought to have been alleviated by a strengthening of male–female bonds (via male provisioning and the evolution of monogamy) or by the assistance of older, postreproductive females (via grandmothering). We suggest that both of these social arrangements could have been present in Plio-Pleistocene hominins if we assume the development of a multilevel society such as that in hamadryas baboons. The evolution of a multilevel society thus underlies the adaptive potential for the complexity that we see in modern human social organization.