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Vallortigara, G., & Rogers, L. J. (2005). Survival with an asymmetrical brain: advantages and disadvantages of cerebral lateralization. Behav Brain Sci, 28(4), 575–89; discussion 589–633.
Abstract: Recent evidence in natural and semi-natural settings has revealed a variety of left-right perceptual asymmetries among vertebrates. These include preferential use of the left or right visual hemifield during activities such as searching for food, agonistic responses, or escape from predators in animals as different as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. There are obvious disadvantages in showing such directional asymmetries because relevant stimuli may be located to the animal's left or right at random; there is no a priori association between the meaning of a stimulus (e.g., its being a predator or a food item) and its being located to the animal's left or right. Moreover, other organisms (e.g., predators) could exploit the predictability of behavior that arises from population-level lateral biases. It might be argued that lateralization of function enhances cognitive capacity and efficiency of the brain, thus counteracting the ecological disadvantages of lateral biases in behavior. However, such an increase in brain efficiency could be obtained by each individual being lateralized without any need to align the direction of the asymmetry in the majority of the individuals of the population. Here we argue that the alignment of the direction of behavioral asymmetries at the population level arises as an “evolutionarily stable strategy” under “social” pressures occurring when individually asymmetrical organisms must coordinate their behavior with the behavior of other asymmetrical organisms of the same or different species.
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Rogers, L. J. (2000). Evolution of hemispheric specialization: advantages and disadvantages. Brain Lang, 73(2), 236–253.
Abstract: Lateralization of the brain appeared early in evolution and many of its features appear to have been retained, possibly even in humans. We now have a considerable amount of information on the different forms of lateralization in a number of species, and the commonalities of these are discussed, but there has been relatively little investigation of the advantages of being lateralized. This article reports new findings on the differences between lateralized and nonlateralized chicks. The lateralized chicks were exposed to light for 24 h on day 19 of incubation, a treatment known to lead to lateralization of a number of visually guided responses, and the nonlateralized chicks were incubated in the dark. When they were feeding, the lateralized chicks were found to detect a stimulus resembling a raptor with shorter latency than nonlateralized chicks. This difference was not a nonspecific effect caused by the light-exposed chicks being more distressed by the stimulus. Instead, it appears to be a genuine advantage conferred by having a lateralized brain. It is suggested that having a lateralized brain allows dual attention to the tasks of feeding (right eye and left hemisphere) and vigilance for predators (left eye and right hemisphere). Nonlateralized chicks appear to perform these dual tasks less efficiently than lateralized ones. Reference is made to other species in discussing these results.
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Müller, A. E., & Thalmann, U. (2000). Origin and evolution of primate social organisation: a reconstruction. Biological Reviews, 75, 405–435.
Abstract: Abstract
The evolution and origin of primate social organisation has attracted the attention of many researchers, and a solitary pattern, believed to be present in most nocturnal prosimians, has been generally considered as the most primitive system. Nocturnal prosimians are in fact mostly seen alone during their nightly activities and therefore termed “solitary foragers”, but that does not mean that they are not social. Moreover, designating their social organisation as “solitary”, implies that their way of life is uniform in all species. It has, however, emerged over the last decades that all of them exhibit not only some kind of social network but also that those networks differ among species. There is a need to classify these social networks in the same manner as with group-living (gregarious) animals if we wish to link up the different forms of primate social organisation with ecological, morphological or phylogenetic variables. In this review, we establish a basic classification based on spatial relations and sociality in order to describe and cope properly with the social organisation patterns of the different species of nocturnal prosimians and other mammals that do not forage in cohesive groups. In attempting to trace the ancestral pattern of primate social organisation, the Malagasy mouse and dwarf lemurs and the Afro-Asian bushbabies and lorises are of special interest because they are thought to approach the ancestral conditions most closely. These species have generally been believed to exhibit a dispersed harem system as their pattern of social organisation (“dispersed” means that individuals forage solitarily but exhibit a social network). Therefore, the ancestral pattern of primate social organisation was inferred to be a dispersed harem. In fact, new field data on cheirogaleids combined with a review of patterns of social organisation in strepsirhines (lemurs, bushbabies and lorises) revealed that they exhibit either dispersed multi-male systems or dispersed monogamy rather than a dispersed harem system. Therefore, the concept of a dispersed harem system as the ancestral condition of primate social organisation can no longer be supported. In combination with data on social organisation patterns in “primitive” placentals and marsupials, and in monotremes, it is in fact most probable that promiscuity is the ancestral pattern for mammalian social organisation. Subsequently, a dispersed multi-male system derived from promiscuity should be regarded as the ancestral condition for primates. We further suggest that the gregarious patterns of social organisation in Aotus and Avahi, and the dispersed form in Tarsius evolved from the gregarious patterns of diurnal primates rather than from the dispersed nocturnal type. It is consequently proposed that, in addition to Aotus and Tarsius, Avahi is also secondarily nocturnal.
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Yokoyama, S., & Radlwimmer, F. B. (1999). The molecular genetics of red and green color vision in mammals. Genetics, 153(2), 919–932.
Abstract: To elucidate the molecular mechanisms of red-green color vision in mammals, we have cloned and sequenced the red and green opsin cDNAs of cat (Felis catus), horse (Equus caballus), gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis), white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), and guinea pig (Cavia porcellus). These opsins were expressed in COS1 cells and reconstituted with 11-cis-retinal. The purified visual pigments of the cat, horse, squirrel, deer, and guinea pig have lambdamax values at 553, 545, 532, 531, and 516 nm, respectively, which are precise to within +/-1 nm. We also regenerated the “true” red pigment of goldfish (Carassius auratus), which has a lambdamax value at 559 +/- 4 nm. Multiple linear regression analyses show that S180A, H197Y, Y277F, T285A, and A308S shift the lambdamax values of the red and green pigments in mammals toward blue by 7, 28, 7, 15, and 16 nm, respectively, and the reverse amino acid changes toward red by the same extents. The additive effects of these amino acid changes fully explain the red-green color vision in a wide range of mammalian species, goldfish, American chameleon (Anolis carolinensis), and pigeon (Columba livia).
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Dall, S. R. X., Houston, A. I., & McNamara, J. M. (2004). The behavioural ecology of personality: consistent individual differences from an adaptive perspective. Ecol. Letters, 7, 734–739.
Abstract: Individual humans, and members of diverse other species, show consistent differences in
aggressiveness, shyness, sociability and activity. Such intraspecific differences in
behaviour have been widely assumed to be non-adaptive variation surrounding
(possibly) adaptive population-average behaviour. Nevertheless, in keeping with recent
calls to apply Darwinian reasoning to ever-finer scales of biological variation, we sketch
the fundamentals of an adaptive theory of consistent individual differences in behaviour.
Our thesis is based on the notion that such .personality differences. can be selected for if
fitness payoffs are dependent on both the frequencies with which competing strategies
are played and an individual`s behavioural history. To this end, we review existing models
that illustrate this and propose a game theoretic approach to analyzing personality
differences that is both dynamic and state-dependent. Our motivation is to provide
insights into the evolution and maintenance of an apparently common animal trait:
personality, which has far reaching ecological and evolutionary implications.
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Rogers, A. R. (1988). Does Biology Constrain Culture? Am Anthropol, 90(4), 819–831.
Abstract: Most social scientists would agree that the capacity for human culture was probably fashioned by natural selection, but they disagree about the implications of this supposition. Some believe that natural selection imposes important constraints on the ways in which culture can vary, while others believe that any such constraints must be negligible. This article employs a “thought experiment” to demonstrate that neither of these positions can be justified by appeal to general properties of culture or of evolution. Natural selection can produce mechanisms of cultural transmission that are neither adaptive nor consistent with the predictions of acultural evolutionary models (those ignoring cultural evolution). On the other hand, natural selection can also produce mechanisms of cultural transmission that are highly consistent with acultural models. Thus, neither side of the sociobiology debate is justified in dismissing the arguments of the other. Natural selection may impose significant constraints on some human behaviors, but negligible constraints on others. Models of simultaneous genetic/cultural evolution will be useful in identifying domains in which acultural evolutionary models are, and are not, likely to be useful.
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Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, & Ernst Fehr. (2003). Explaining altruistic behavior in humans. Evolution and Human Behaviour, 24(3), 153–172.
Abstract: Recent experimental research has revealed forms of human behavior involving interaction among unrelated individuals that have proven difficult to explain in terms of kin or reciprocal altruism. One such trait, strong reciprocity is a predisposition to cooperate with others and to punish those who violate the norms of cooperation, at personal cost, even when it is implausible to expect that these costs will be repaid. We present evidence supporting strong reciprocity as a schema for predicting and understanding altruism in humans. We show that under conditions plausibly characteristic of the early stages of human evolution, a small number of strong reciprocators could invade a population of self-regarding types, and strong reciprocity is an evolutionary stable strategy. Although most of the evidence we report is based on behavioral experiments, the same behaviors are regularly described in everyday life, for example, in wage setting by firms, tax compliance, and cooperation in the protection of local environmental public goods.
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Weissing, F. J. (2011). Animal behaviour: Born leaders. Nature, 474(7351), 288–289.
Abstract: Social animals face a dilemma. To reap the benefits of group living, they have to stay together. However, individuals differ in their preferences as to where to go and what to do next. If all individuals follow their own preferences, group coherence is undermined, resulting in an outcome that is unfavourable for everyone. Neglecting one's own preferences and following a leader is one way to resolve this coordination problem. But what attributes make an individual a 'leader'? A modelling study by Johnstone and Manica1 illuminates this question.
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Cochet, H., & Byrne, R. W. (2013). Evolutionary origins of human handedness: evaluating contrasting hypotheses. Animal Cognition, 16(4), 531–542.
Abstract: Variation in methods and measures, resulting in past dispute over the existence of population handedness in nonhuman great apes, has impeded progress into the origins of human right-handedness and how it relates to the human hallmark of language. Pooling evidence from behavioral studies, neuroimaging and neuroanatomy, we evaluate data on manual and cerebral laterality in humans and other apes engaged in a range of manipulative tasks and in gestural communication. A simplistic human/animal partition is no longer tenable, and we review four (nonexclusive) possible drivers for the origin of population-level right-handedness: skilled manipulative activity, as in tool use; communicative gestures; organizational complexity of action, in particular hierarchical structure; and the role of intentionality in goal-directed action. Fully testing these hypotheses will require developmental and evolutionary evidence as well as modern neuroimaging data.
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Matsumura, S., & Kobayashi, T. (1998). A game model for dominance relations among group-living animals. Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol., 42(2), 77–84.
Abstract: Abstract We present here an attempt to understand behaviors of dominant individuals and of subordinate individuals as behavior strategies in an asymmetric “hawk-dove” game. We assume that contestants have perfect information about relative fighting ability and the value of the resource. Any type of asymmetry, both relevant to and irrelevant to the fighting ability, can be considered. It is concluded that evolutionarily stable strategies (ESSs) depend on the resource value (V), the cost of injury (D), and the probability that the individual in one role will win (x). Different ESSs can exist even when values of V, D, and x are the same. The characteristics of dominance relations detected by observers may result from the ESSs that the individuals are adopting. The model explains some characteristics of dominance relations, for example, the consistent outcome of contests, the rare occurrence of escalated fights, and the discrepancy between resource holding potential (RHP) and dominance relations, from the viewpoint of individual selection.
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