[tt] NS: Kinship is key for altruistic species

[Premise Checker]

E.O. Wilson became a group selection man recently, as I learned from this 
very publication.

Kinship is key for altruistic species
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826595.300&print=true
8.6.4

KIN selection - the idea that individuals get their genes passed
along by assisting close relatives to reproduce - helped solve one
of evolution's trickiest puzzles: altruism. Eusocial insects,
including some bees, wasps and ants, are an extreme example, where
sterile workers have sacrificed their own reproduction to help rear
the queen's offspring.

Yet this bedrock of theory was recently shaken when Harvard
University evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson claimed altruism
evolved because it benefits groups, rather than genes. For such
"group selection" to take place, he argued, animals don't need to be
closely related, they just need to stick together and cooperate.
Close relatedness then follows.

Now a team led by William Hughes of Leeds University, UK, claims to
have falsified Wilson's predictions, showing that genetic
relatedness is a key to evolving eusociality in the first place.

Hughes and colleagues reconstructed the mating systems of the
solitary ancestors of 267 eusocial bees, wasps and ants, labelling
each as either monandrous - where females mate with one male,
leading to high levels of genetic relatedness within the colony - or
polyandrous, where females pick a number of mates, yielding high
levels of genetic variability. They found the mating system at the
origin of each lineage of eusocial insects was monandry (Science,
vol 320, p 1213).

"Wilson predicted that high relatedness evolves after eusociality.
We show that it is ancestral. It's pretty cut and dry, really," says
Hughes.

Evolution - Learn more about the struggle to survive in our
comprehensive special report.

Related Articles

Altruism is no family matter
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19726383.900
12 January 2008
Comment: The group delusion
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19726385.700
12 January 2008
Evolution: Survival of the selfless
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626281.500
3 November 2007
Why altruism paid off for our ancestors
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn10750
7 December 2006

Weblinks

William O. H. Hughes, Leeds University
http://www.fbs.leeds.ac.uk/staff/profile.php?tag=Hughes_W
Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University
http://www-museum.unl.edu/research/entomology/workers/EWilson.htm