In eusocial species, some individuals sacrifice their own reproduction for the benefit of others. The evolutionary transition towards eusociality may have been facilitated by ancestral species having ...

In his famous haplodiploidy hypothesis, W. D. Hamilton proposed that high sister—sister relatedness facilitates the evolution of kin-selected reproductive altruism among Hymenopteran females.

AbstractHamilton suggested that inflated relatedness between sisters promotes the evolution of eusociality in haplodiploid populations. Trivers and Hare observed that for this to occur, workers have ...

Explaining the origin of eusociality, with strict division of labour between workers and reproductives, remains one of evolutionary biology’s greatest challenges. Specific combinations of genetic, ...