Andrés E. Quiñones & William Wcislo As a result of different brood cell provisioning strategies, nest-making insects may differ in the extent to which adults regularly provide extended parental care to their brood beyond nest defense. Mass-provisioning species cache the entire food supply needed for larval development prior to the oviposition and typically seal the brood cell. It is usually...

Andrés E. Quiñones, G. Sander van Doorn, Ido Pen, Franz J. Weissing, Michael Taborsky Cooperation in social groups is easily undermined by selfish behaviour, unless mechanisms are in place to mitigate conflicts of interest between group members. One such mechanism is to preferentially cooperate with relatives, who have aligned fitness interests by virtue of their shared genes. Alternatively, co...

Andrés E. Quiñones, Lucas Molleman, Franz J. Weissing. The role of cultural group selection in the evolution of human cooperation is hotly debated. It has been argued that group selection is more effective in cultural evolution than in genetic evolution, because some forms of cultural transmission (conformism and/or the tendency to follow a leader) reduce intra-group variation while creating st...

Andrés E. Quiñones & Ido Pen The evolution of eusociality is considered one of the major transitions in evolution. This transition entails changes in many facets of a species biology, thus, many traits are expected to evolve together. Eusociality’s hallmark trait is worker behaviour, whereby individuals forgo their own reproduction to work in the parental nest. Worker behaviour is known to ...