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Social Organisms (social + organism)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Life Sciences	75%

Selected Abstracts

Power and Wisdom: Toward a History of Social Behavior

JOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR, Issue 4 2003
Akop P. Nazaretyan
Cross-disciplinary studies carried out lately by Russian scholars discovered a causal relationship between the three variables: technological potential, cultural regulation quality, and social sustainability. The patterns called techno-humanitarian balance law, states that the higher production and war technologies' power, the more refined the behaviorregulation means (consolidated values and norms, etc.) that are required for self-preservation of the society. The article shows that the law has controlled social selection for all of human history and prehistory, discarding unbalanced social organisms, as far as they could not cope with ecological and (or) geopolitical crises, which had been caused by their own activities. It also shows how successive growth of instrumental opportunities in long-term retrospection has dramatically led to the consecutive perfection of cultural and psychological regulation mechanisms. Relevant calculations, comparative-anthropological evidence, and historical illustrations are provided. Regularities in mental processes are described that precede and accompany crisis-causing behavior, to certain extent regardless of population's historical and cultural peculiarities. [source]

Reproductive conflict delays the recovery of an endangered social species

JOURNAL OF ANIMAL ECOLOGY, Issue 1 2009
Andrés López-Sepulcre
Summary 1Evolutionary theory predicts that individuals, in order to increase their relative fitness, can evolve behaviours that are detrimental for the group or population. This mismatch is particularly visible in social organisms. Despite its potential to affect the population dynamics of social animals, this principle has not yet been applied to real-life conservation. 2Social group structure has been argued to stabilize population dynamics due to the buffering effects of nonreproducing subordinates. However, competition for breeding positions in such species can also interfere with the reproduction of breeding pairs. 3Seychelles magpie robins, Copsychus sechellarum, live in social groups where subordinate individuals do not breed. Analysis of long-term individual-based data and short-term behavioural observations show that subordinates increase the territorial takeover frequency of established breeders. Such takeovers delay offspring production and decrease territory productivity. 4Individual-based simulations of the Seychelles magpie robin population parameterized with the long-term data show that this process has significantly postponed the recovery of the species from the Critically Endangered status. 5Social conflict thus can extend the period of high extinction risk, which we show to have population consequences that should be taken into account in management programmes. This is the first quantitative assessment of the effects of social conflict on conservation. [source]

Are yeasts free-living unicellular eukaryotes?

LETTERS IN APPLIED MICROBIOLOGY, Issue 6 2005
J.R. Dickinson
Summary Yeasts are defined as unicellular fungi, yet many recent observations suggest their whole lifestyle is anything but unicellular. This review surveys the evidence that yeasts are really social organisms with cell-to-cell communication. [source]

Molecular ecology of social behaviour: analyses of breeding systems and genetic structure

MOLECULAR ECOLOGY, Issue 2 2001
Kenneth G. Ross
Abstract Molecular genetic studies of group kin composition and local genetic structure in social organisms are becoming increasingly common. A conceptual and mathematical framework that links attributes of the breeding system to group composition and genetic structure is presented here, and recent empirical studies are reviewed in the context of this framework. Breeding system properties, including the number of breeders in a social group, their genetic relatedness, and skew in their parentage, determine group composition and the distribution of genetic variation within and between social units. This group genetic structure in turn influences the opportunities for conflict and cooperation to evolve within groups and for selection to occur among groups or clusters of groups. Thus, molecular studies of social groups provide the starting point for analyses of the selective forces involved in social evolution, as well as for analyses of other fundamental evolutionary problems related to sex allocation, reproductive skew, life history evolution, and the nature of selection in hierarchically structured populations. The framework presented here provides a standard system for interpreting and integrating genetic and natural history data from social organisms for application to a broad range of evolutionary questions. [source]