A commitment model of reproductive inhibition in cooperatively breeding groups
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cooperatively breeding groups include individuals that give up some current reproductive opportunities while remaining in a group. In some cases, these individuals are physiologically or morphologically unable to reproduce. Empirical and theoretical evidence suggest that this inability often does not result from stress or manipulation by dominants against the interests of subordinates. I argue that such reproductive inhibition can represent a commitment not to reproduce in exchange for a reduction in costs imposed by dominants. I present a model that allows subordinates to choose whether to inhibit their own reproduction (‘‘self-inhibition’’) and accept no direct reproduction while in the group or to remain flexible and attempt to take a share of group productivity. If dominants assess the reproductive status of subordinates and punish those that reproduce, this model predicts self-inhibition when group members are closely related, opportunities for independent breeding are poor, assessment of reproductive status and eviction are costly, and the chance of being detected when cheating is high. However, dominants are less likely to assess the reproductive status of subordinates that are closely related, resulting in a narrow window of relatedness in which self-inhibition is favored. Counterintuitively, this window is wider when flexible subordinates would be able to take a large share of group production. Although the model assumes that dominants are able to reliably detect commitment, it is generally robust against mistakes in the form of dominants failing to assess uncommitted subordinates, or even low frequencies of deception by flexible subordinates. Key words: credibility, imperfect information, reproductive skew, reproductive sup-pression. [Behav Ecol 15:585–591 (2004)] Cooperative breeding and eusociality are taxonomicallywidespread, occurring in social arthropods (including
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".