Gadagkar, R., 2021. More Fun Than Fun: How Do Animals Recognise their Kin? The Wire Science.

Gadagkar, R (2021) Gadagkar, R., 2021. More Fun Than Fun: How Do Animals Recognise their Kin? The Wire Science. In:

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Abstract

Honey bee workers almost never reproduce. Instead, they spend their entire lives working for the welfare of their colony and their queen’s offspring. They may even die in defence of their colony as their every act of stinging is an act of suicide. Clearly, honey bee workers challenge Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Darwin certainly thought so, calling them a “special difficulty, which at first appeared to me insuperable, and actually fatal to my whole theory”. In the mid-20th Century, the British-Indian biologist J.B.S. Haldane was the first to make light of this difficulty when he realised that saving two of his drowning brothers would compensate the risk of his death while attempting to do so. Another British biologist W.D. Hamilton independently discovered this extension to natural selection, that has come to be known as kin selection. With rigorous mathematics, Hamilton showed that a gene causing altruistic behaviour could indeed be favoured by natural selection, provided the altruism is directed towards close genetic relatives. Kin selection theory was a watershed moment in evolutionary biology, especially for those attempting to discover the evolutionary logic of ecology and behaviour. Kin selection spawned several sub-disciplines – evolutionary ecology, behavioural ecology, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and their various cousins. Practitioners of these sub-disciplines grew exponentially as did their research papers, books and journals and even university departments.

Item Type:	Editorials/Short Communications
Additional Information:	The copyright of this article belongs to the Authors.
Department/Centre:	Division of Biological Sciences > Centre for Ecological Sciences
Date Deposited:	23 Mar 2021 09:43
Last Modified:	02 Jun 2022 07:10
URI:	https://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/68421

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