eusociality
awild | February 12, 2009In honor of the old man's 200th, Myrmecos Blog is proud to feature Charles Darwin writing prophetically about the problems posed by social insects for his theory of natural selection.  The passage below is from the first edition of On the Origin of Species, and in it Darwin anticipates the same answers- kin and group selection- that later generations of biologists converged on to solve the riddle. Not bad for a barnacle taxonomist...
No doubt many instincts of very difficult explanation could be opposed to the theory of natural selection,âcases, in which we cannot see how an instinct could…
grrlscientist | October 4, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, Brown paper wasp, Polistes fuscatus, hymenoptera, evolution, eusociality, social behavior
Brown paper wasp , Polistes fuscatus.
Fairport, New York, USA. 2003.
Many thanks to Alex Wild for sharing his amazing images here.
Thanks to Elizabeth Tibbetts for the species identification.
[larger view]
Eusociality, or "true social behavior", is the most extreme form of cooperative sociality known. Due to its seemingly altruistic nature, eusociality has provided many interesting challenges for evolutionary theory. Eusociality, as exemplified by ants, bees and wasps, is…