Promiscuity and the evolution of cooperative breeding
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Empirical data suggest that low levels of promiscuity have played a key role in the evolution of cooperative breeding and eusociality. However, from a theoretical perspective, low levels of promiscuity can favour dispersal away from the natal patch, and have been argued to select against cooperation in a way that cannot be explained by inclusive fitness theory. Here, we use an inclusive fitness approach to model selection to stay and help in a simple patch-structured population, with strict density dependence, where helping increases the survival of the breeder on the patch. Our model predicts that the level of promiscuity has either no influence or a slightly positive influence on selection for helping. This prediction is driven by the fact that, in our model, staying to help leads to increased competition between relatives for the breeding position-when promiscuity is low (and relatedness is high), the best way to aid relatives is by dispersing to avoid competing with them. Furthermore, we found the same results with an individual-based simulation, showing that this is not an area where inclusive fitness theory 'gets it wrong'. We suggest that our predicted influence of promiscuity is sensitive to biological assumptions, and that if a possibly more biologically relevant scenario were examined, where helping provided fecundity benefits and there was not strict density dependence, then low levels of promiscuity would favour helping, as has been observed empirically.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".