Bibliographic record
Abstract
The history of life is punctuated by major transitions in individuality, when previously-independent biological units assemble into new agents. The stability of these evolutionary alliances is governed by the extent of cooperation and conflict among their constituents. In this thesis, I explore how ecology influences these social interactions. Part I investigates cooperation in arthropod societies. W. D. Hamilton's haplodiploidy hypothesis, which holds that asymmetries in sibling relatedness explain the exclusively-female worker caste of the social Hymenoptera, has fallen out of favour; instead, the preadaptation of females for rearing young is thought to explain who helps in these taxa. Analysing the evolution of paternal care, I show that this pattern of preadaptation is not itself a consequence of haplodiploidy inhibiting brood care by males. I then show how five key factors of sexual ecology—sex-specific preadaptation, labile sex allocation, sib-mating, promiscuity, and reproductive autonomy—have a major impact upon the evolution of sex-biased helping in arthropod societies. Finally, inclusive-fitness theory predicts that monogamy should promote worker sterility in insect societies, but a recent population-genetics model has challenged this prediction. I show that relaxing this model's genetic, evolutionary, and ecological assumptions supports inclusive-fitness theory. Part II investigates conflict within genomes. I show that transposons are under selection to drive their host populations extinct, and explore the transposon–host and transposon–transposon interactions that might prevent this outcome. While neither selection against transposons' deleterious effects nor exploitation by parasites can plausibly prevent extinction, I show that host suppression of transposons can; however, this is only stable in the long term if suppression makes transposition costlier. I conclude that complex life could not exist without the active suppression of genetic conflict. Overall, I argue that ecology explains patterns of cooperation and conflict across the major transitions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".