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Social Behavior, Cooperation, and Kinship

M. Breed,Janice Moore

Published 2022 in Animal Behavior

ABSTRACT

Animals live in groups primarily for shared protection from predators, to cooperate in discovering and hunting food, and to take advantage of public information. Hamilton's theory of the geometry of a selfish herd explains why animals can come together in such groups even if they have no evolutionary interest in the survival of other members of the group. This reasoning explains groupings that include only animals of one species as well as groups that include two or more species. For many groups the motivations for living together are more complicated and involve aid-giving among animals in the group. This chapter puts forward a series of ideas—group selection, kin selection transactional and social contract models, reproductive skew, delayed competition/selfish teamwork, and stolen aid—as explanations for living in groups. A key concept is that that kinship structure—the web of genetic relationships among animals in such groups—is often important in determining cooperative and competitive interactions within groups. Sometimes groups consist of two or more species. Mutual benefits from the association, exploitation of public information, or parasitism underlie these types of social groups.

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