Kin selection, a type of natural selection that considers the role relatives play when evaluating the genetic fitness of a given individual. Kin selection is based on 'inclusive fitness', the idea that, for example, sterile workers can accrue reproductive benefits by helping their relatives. I'm trying to understand what problem led to a development of kin selection. Kin Selection in Social Insects The honeybee and other social insects provide the clearest example of kin selection. Microsatellites are short tandem repeats of DNA, such as the doublet CA repeated nine times in succession. Their evolution is entirely dependent on adaptable sisters and daughters, working in the dangerous world outside. Through their behavior they bear brunt of changes in environment. This is where altruism and kin selection play a huge role in the lives of bee’s and ants. Scientists have not yet sorted out the underlying evolutionary forces that lead to the presence of dominance hierarchies in so many eusocial species; division of labor, competition for production of males, and suppression of production of both males and females are the leading hypotheses. Like kin selection, reciprocity and punishment require directing cooperation to others. After all, the queen is either mother or sister to every bee in her colony. The wild-type organism was a tetracycline-resistant strain (PAO985) whilst the mutator strain was deficient in the mismatch repair gene mutS, and had a spontaneous mutation rate some two orders of magnitude higher than the wild type. Benefits will change allele frequency only to the extent that the helping allele is present above random levels in the beneficiaries. Copyright © 2021 Elsevier B.V. or its licensors or contributors. Kin selection is a way of understanding allele frequency change as a consequence of the actions and interactions amongst individuals who share alleles by recent common descent, that is, kin. Experiments were run over 250 generations, enough to attain equilibrium conditions. In the limit, all copies of an allele in the present generation can be traced back to a single allele in the remote past and in this sense they are all identical by descent. In social insects, such as wasps and bees, workers remove eggs laid by other workers, because they are more related to the queen’s eggs than to the worker-laid eggs. The answer comes from mathematical population genetic models, but the idea is easy to understand. Kin selection works because relatives share genes. Accordingly, there ought to be a relationship between high mutators and cheats and this proved to be true in the competition experiments. Throngs of sterile female workers handle nearly every other task in the colony, from scouting and collecting food, to building the nest or hive, and raising the young. If a worker has a mutation that makes it better at finding food in a new region, evolutionary reason would predict that mutation ought to be passed along to the next generation of workers. In diploid organisms, every parent (top row) transmits 50% of its genetic information to each offspring (middle row). And a few years ago, Zayed and his colleagues wondered whether they could use genetic evidence to back up Hamilton's fifty-year-old idea. Worker bees are the most important part of any bee colony, gathering food, building the hive, taking care of babies, and maintaining the temperature inside the hive at what Zayed calls a "balmy 33 degrees Celsius." Along…. In this competitive arena, females may select males directly precopulation, but more … But a new theory that includes hedging bets against nature’s unpredictability may help to change the math and shift the debate. "In 2003, David Queller published a key model using kin selection theory that predicted that under queenless conditions in a honey bee colony, the patrigenes would promote selfish behavior in the workers, while the matrigenes would promote altruistic behavior," said Galbraith. The theory was called "kin selection," and it suggests that non-reproducing animals still benefit when another member of their group is having babies. Cousins are 1/8. Eusocial Behavior in Honey Bees Bob Battaglia and Sierra Wood General Background References Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are social insects; they live in colonies with a highly ordered division of labor mediated by complex interaction. 5 According to theory, high relatedness favored kin selection and ought to reduce the incidence of cheating genotypes developing whilst the converse is true where relatedness is low. The coefficient of relatedness. This is where altruism and kin selection play a huge role in the lives of bee’s and ants. It's hard not to ponder the implications of those queens with their static, unchanging behavior inside the hive. The existence of dominance hierarchies in a broad range of primitively eusocial species (or, in the case of the naked mole rat, a highly eusocial species) suggests that reproductive suppression may not be an entirely voluntary act on the part of the workers. Every so often, a honeybee queen leaves the hive where she was born to found a new colony. Experiments were designed to investigate high relatedness (pure cultures of either strain) or low relatedness (50:50 mixtures of both strains together). B. Brembs, in Brenner's Encyclopedia of Genetics (Second Edition), 2013. Fitness was defined above in terms of successful reproduction, that is, the number of offspring carrying the selected allele. Examples of this behavior follows. Using kin selection theory, David Haig, professor, Harvard University, developed models predicting intragenomic conflict, which Queller then extended to social insect societies. According to Queller (2006) kin selection is defined by how a "gene can produce copies of itself by increasing the fitness of its bearer (direct fitness) or by increasing the fitness of its relatives who share copies of the gene (indirect fitness)" (p.165). Michael D. Breed, Janice Moore, in Animal Behavior (Second Edition), 2016. York University biologist Amro Zayed worked with a team of Canadian and Saudi Arabian researchers to unravel a genetic mystery that has long intrigued evolutionary biologists. Canto: The term ‘kin selection’ was first used by John Maynard Smith in the early sixties but it was first mooted by Darwin (who got it right about honey bees), and its mathematics were worked out back in the 1930s. The benefit of altruism decreases rapidly with declining relatedness. Competition between males for matings with females is a common and significant feature of the biology of animals (Andersson 1994; Alcock 2005). Kin selection is a way of understanding allele frequency change as a consequence of the actions and interactions among individuals who share alleles by recent common descent – ie, kin. Honeybees using their wings to fan the hive and keep it cool. One may also say that r is a measure of the probability that any given allele is shared by two individuals. Hauser, in Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, 2009. But both are mathematical instruments that cannot tell us about the causal influences on evolutionary change. Relatedness can also be estimated though pedigree methods. Evidently, a very high coefficient of relatedness is needed to overcome high fitness costs due to sterility or decrease in life expectancy or both. Their test system was Ps. And yet the workers can't pass along the behaviors they've evolved without their queen. Kin selection is the evolutionary strategy that favours the reproductive success of an organism's relatives, even at a cost to the organism's own survival and reproduction. In some highly eusocial insects, there is a distinct possibility that queens engage in chemical suppression of the workers in the colony. A regression coefficient does exactly that. William Donald Hamilton (1936–2000) discovered the principle of ‘kin selection’, which seemed for a long while to answer this question. The evolution of altruistic traits, which is opposed within groups but favored between groups, is facilitated by close kinship within groups. This is not a trivial question and it takes some computational effort to solve it. Kin selection, a recognized evolutionary process amongst living organisms, was first recognized as an important mechanism in evolutionary theory by Hamilton (1964). This model challenges stereotypic assumptions that complex societies require a central directing figure for efficient functioning. In many of these colonies, the queen is the only female that reproduces. It is evident that such ‘genic selection’ will favor an allele that enhances the reproductive success not only of its carrier but also of all other individuals sufficiently related to it. As with group selection, it is a consequence of the properties of groups that cause allele frequency change. Also, there is a distinct possibility that eusociality could be explained by coercion, rather than by kin selection. Save big on laptops, tablets, outdoor furnishings, everyday household items, and more! She's in this benign environment, afforded by the actions of workers who collect food and nurse the brood and thermo-regulate the hive. Japanese honey bees have a unique defensive trait against the enormous — and sting-proof — giant…. ScienceDirect ® is a registered trademark of Elsevier B.V. ScienceDirect ® is a registered trademark of Elsevier B.V. Brenner's Encyclopedia of Genetics (Second Edition), William Donald Hamilton (1936–2000) discovered the principle of ‘, Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior (Second Edition), Social Interaction Effects on Reward and Cognitive Abilities in Monkeys. A few examples of these are mentioned below: In species where cannibalism occurs in response to food limitation, individuals should prefer to eat nonrelatives, as occurs in tiger salamanders and ladybirds. Kin selection is a way of understanding allele frequency change as a consequence of the actions and interactions among individuals who share alleles by recent common descent – ie, kin. Scientists have not yet sorted out the underlying evolutionary forces that lead to the presence of dominance hierarchies in so many eusocial species; division of labor, competition for production of males, and suppression of production of both males and females are the leading hypotheses. This also helps explain why there is such a huge amount of variation in honeybee behavior from subspecies to subspecies — and even from colony to colony. Second, similarity at the social locus could be due to factors other than average kinship, such as the green-beard genes discussed in the following sections. Again, we have to ask, how are these good traits being passed on from one sterile generation to the next? Relatedness can be measured in several ways. The theory was called " kin selection," and it suggests that non-reproducing animals still benefit when another member of their group is having babies. Relatedness to a maternal half sibling is 1/4, the average of 1/2 for genes identical by descent through the mother, and 0 for genes identical by descent through the father. Thus, the question whether ‘cooperative’ genes may spread even if the cooperation infers fitness costs can be solved both by simulation to find out the critical ranges of the parameters in question and experimentally by measuring the relevant parameters and comparing them to the simulated results. This approach accounts for all of the social effects on a gene in a focal individual rather than on the effects of the gene in a focal individual on others. Wilson and colleagues published a paper that argued kin selection is not needed for altruistic behavior to evolve. Kin selection is an instance of inclusive fitness, which combines the number of offspring produced with the number an individual can ensure the production of by supporting others, such as siblings. Though humans are very different from social insects, there is still something poignant in the lifecycles of honeybees for us city-dwelling Homo sapiens. Hamilton’s strike of genius was to reformulate the definition of fitness as the number of an individual’s alleles in the next generation. For selection to increase the frequency of an allele, that allele has to do better than the average allele in the population.

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