Berger, J. (1983). Induced abortion and social factors in wild horses. Nature, 303(5912), 59–61.
Abstract: Much evidence now suggests that the postnatal killing of young in primates and carnivores, and induced abortions in some rodents, are evolved traits exerting strong selective pressures on adult male and female behaviour. Among ungulates it is perplexing that either no species have developed convergent tactics or that these behaviours are not reported, especially as ungulates have social systems similar to those of members of the above groups. Only in captive horses (Equus caballus) has infant killing been reported. It has been estimated that 40,000 wild horses live in remote areas of the Great Basin Desert of North America (US Department of Interior (Bureau of Land Management), unpublished report), where they occur in harems (females and young) defended by males. Here I present evidence that, rather than killing infants directly, invading males induce abortions in females unprotected by their resident stallions and these females are then inseminated by the new males.
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Franks, N. R., & Richardson, T. (2006). Teaching in tandem-running ants. Nature, 439(7073), 153.
Abstract: The ant Temnothorax albipennis uses a technique known as tandem running to lead another ant from the nest to food--with signals between the two ants controlling both the speed and course of the run. Here we analyse the results of this communication and show that tandem running is an example of teaching, to our knowledge the first in a non-human animal, that involves bidirectional feedback between teacher and pupil. This behaviour indicates that it could be the value of information, rather than the constraint of brain size, that has influenced the evolution of teaching.
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Adolphs, R. (2003). Cognitive neuroscience of human social behaviour. Nat Rev Neurosci, 4(3), 165–178.
Abstract: We are an intensely social species--it has been argued that our social nature defines what makes us human, what makes us conscious or what gave us our large brains. As a new field, the social brain sciences are probing the neural underpinnings of social behaviour and have produced a banquet of data that are both tantalizing and deeply puzzling. We are finding new links between emotion and reason, between action and perception, and between representations of other people and ourselves. No less important are the links that are also being established across disciplines to understand social behaviour, as neuroscientists, social psychologists, anthropologists, ethologists and philosophers forge new collaborations.
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Packer, C. (1977). Reciprocal altruism in Papio anubis. Nature, 265, 441–445.
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Nowak, M. A., & Sigmund, K. (1992). Tit for tat in heterogeneous populations. Nature, 355, 250–253.
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Maynard Smith, J., & Price, G. R. (1973). The Logic of Animal Conflict. Nature, 246, 15–18.
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Hamilton, W. D. (1970). Selfish and Spiteful Behaviour in an Evolutionary Model. Nature, 228, 1218–1220.
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Reeve, H. K. (1992). Queen activation of lazy workers in colonies of the eusocial naked mole-rat. Nature, 358, 147–149.
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Rizzolatti, G., Fogassi, L., & Gallese, V. (2001). Neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the understanding and imitation of action. Nat Rev Neurosci, 2(9), 661–670.
Abstract: What are the neural bases of action understanding? Although this capacity could merely involve visual analysis of the action, it has been argued that we actually map this visual information onto its motor representation in our nervous system. Here we discuss evidence for the existence of a system, the ‘mirror system’, that seems to serve this mapping function in primates and humans, and explore its implications for the understanding and imitation of action.
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Conradt, L., & Roper, T. J. (2003). Group decision-making in animals. Nature, 421(6919), 155–158.
Abstract: Groups of animals often need to make communal decisions, for example about which activities to perform, when to perform them and which direction to travel in; however, little is known about how they do so. Here, we model the fitness consequences of two possible decision-making mechanisms: 'despotism' and 'democracy'. We show that under most conditions, the costs to subordinate group members, and to the group as a whole, are considerably higher for despotic than for democratic decisions. Even when the despot is the most experienced group member, it only pays other members to accept its decision when group size is small and the difference in information is large. Democratic decisions are more beneficial primarily because they tend to produce less extreme decisions, rather than because each individual has an influence on the decision per se. Our model suggests that democracy should be widespread and makes quantitative, testable predictions about group decision-making in non-humans.
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