Multilevel selection on individual and group social behaviour in the wild
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The degree to which phenotypes are shaped by multilevel selection – the theoretical framework proposing natural selection occurs at more than one level of biological organisation – is a classic debate in biology. Though social behaviours are a common theoretical example for multilevel selection, it is unknown if and how multilevel selection acts on sociality in the wild. We studied the relative strength of multilevel selection on both individual behaviour and group social structure, quantified with social networks and 19 years of data from a wild, free-living mammal, the yellow-bellied marmot ( Marmota flaviventer ). Contextual analysis revealed multilevel selection in specific fitness and life history contexts, with selection for group social structure being just as strong, if not stronger, than individual social behaviour. We also found antagonistic multilevel selection within and between levels, potentially explaining why increased sociality is not as beneficial or heritable in this system comparatively to other social taxa. Thus, the evolutionary dynamics of hierarchal or nested biological traits should be assessed at multiple levels simultaneously to tell a more accurate and comprehensive story. Overall, we provide empirical evidence suggesting that multilevel selection acts on social relationships and structures in the wild, and provide direct evidence for a classic, unanswered question in biology.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".