We show theoretically that this compounding effect is a key facilitator to evolve complex social life, thereby explaining a major evolutionary transition!

In our new study we were the first to experimentally simulate the origin of sociality! By controlling how many wasp 🐝daughters could help their mom, we found that early helpers don't just add to colony success—they multiply it!

Theoretical results show that the observed benefits of helping readily allow for the evolution of eusociality, although most readily so with alleles of large effect (penetrance parameter P=1, bottom row) & under single mating (me=1), when sib-sib relatedness is high.

We then use our experimental data to parameterize a population genetic model for the evolution of eusociality, with opposing among-group & within-group selection on a eusociality allele.

Theoretically, we show that these nonlinearities arise from compounding effects of helping early on: workers produced early on help to produce more workers before dispersing sexuals are produced.

Our experimental data from Polistes gallicus paper wasps show that there is a concave relationship between the final number of sexuals reared and the proportion of females that stay & help. This shows there are large benefits of helping, but that these are also highly nonlinear.

Very happy to see our new study on the evolution of eusociality come out in Evolution Letters! Our study is the first to experimentally manipulate the proportion of females that stay and help to simulate incipient sociality & assess fitness impact of helping. 🧵

That option of allowing your data to be used for the next model can be switched on or off in the settings... But yes, a bit tricky potentially when people are pasting in copyrighted material. I recall that when you paste in PDFs you are not allowed to publicly share those conversations though.

Happy New Year to you all! My Christmas holidays involved helping my son make a DNA molecule model using a 3D pen & getting a new pet for him: leaf insects! Great fun!

In first grade we just demonstrated a Makeblock robot with a mobile phone mounted on its back with ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode, to pretend the robot was able to talk! The kids & teacher absolutely loved it! It answered all the kids' questions for a full hour! It could even talk with a robot voice!

If I gave it twice as much time to be able to get through all 35 puzzles, ChatGPT o1 gets an IQ score of just 88... Not great...

As my son thought some of the graphs were not quite exciting enough, I've also included a fun script that produces various cool visualisation - various fractals etc..., including a couple of 3D ones : www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/qbwo2...

Enjoy!

The lecture material of my latest data visualisation class in R, using both base R & ggplot, which was part of our Advanced Biological Data Analysis course here : www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/0via9... #rstats

The popular summary in the Economist was also cool: www.economist.com/science-and-...

Nice perspectives article about our earlier Current Biology study on the inheritance of alternative nest architectures in stingless bees led by my postdoc Viviana Di Pietro: link.springer.com/article/10.3... Original article here: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Ruben's self balancing robot just about made it to the finish line. Great fun those Makeblock robots! :-)