Altruism is the principle or practice of selfless concern for the well-being of others. The paper The Evolution of Eusociality argues that the kin selection theory, which refers to the evolutionary strategy that favors the reproductive success of an organism's relatives, even at a cost to the organism's own survival and reproduction, is an unnecessary explanation for the evolution of altruistic behavior, or “eusociality”, and proposes alternative hypotheses based on a two-part mathematical analysis. Kin selection is based on inclusive fitness, which states that organisms can accrue reproductive benefits by helping their relatives. In doing so, they help shared genes to survive and be inherited by the next generation. Thus eusociality can evolve. However, the authors of this paper argue that inclusive fitness is unnecessary to explain eusociality. They observed ants to calculate which of two behaviours, defection or cooperation, would become more prevalent in a population through standard natural selection. They determined that inclusive fitness delivers the same result only in a limited, unrealistic solutions. When the inclusive fitness theory worked, it had no greater success than that derived from standard natural selection. The second mathematical analysis, investigated the manner in which eusociality could evolve through standard natural selection. The authors observed that whether or not eusociality evolves is dependent on the size of the ant colony and how this affects the mortality and fertility of the queen. The authors concluded that eusociality could evolve with some difficulty but is “very stable once established.”
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