Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

A fundamental goal of behavioural genetics is to understand how complex social behaviour evolves. From humans to social insects to mole rats, social animals fascinate us, probably because it is so remarkable that evolution has, in these few cases, favored cooperation and altruism over conflict and selfishness. We know from the theory of social evolution that these seemingly non-Darwinian traits can evolve via a type of kin-mediated natural selection, known as 'kin selection', provided the trait has a genetic basis. Aspects of social behaviour are certainly evolved, but we do not yet know which genes are under selection, or how these genes interact with each other and their environment to influence the social phenotype. Moreover, sociality will, in turn, influence the expression and transmission of genes, but it is not always clear how. What is clear is that to fully understand the evolution of social traits, we need to think in molecular terms. The aim of my research is to drive the discipline of behavioural genetics forward to explore the new domain of 'sociogenomics' - the molecular basis of social behaviour. To do this, I use two species of highly social insects for which state-of-the-art technologies can be applied to measure what effect, if any, genes have on their behaviour. A leading hypothesis is that social integration is evolutionarily driven by an ability to recognize and preferentially direct altruism toward close kin, thereby propagating 'genes for altruism' down genealogical lines. I use a species of termite to test this idea by quantifying how kinship influences inter-individual recognition in natural populations. A related hypothesis is that the expression of altruism should depend on social circumstance, not just relatedness. I use the honey bee to examine how gene expression mediates altruism under experimentally manipulated hive conditions. My objective is to assess the genetic, and thus environmental, effect on social traits, and to characterise the genes that underlie variation in these traits.