Sociobiology

Recomendado pela AMICOR Maria Inês Reinert Azambuja Today's CEM seminar speaker *Moved to LSE 104*

Ullica Segerstrale Professor, Department of Sociology Illinois Institute of Technology Sociobiology, The Sequel: Conflict about cooperation In science, the field of evolution seems unusually prone to controversy. A memorable case is the acrimonious, quarter century long academic sociobiology debate around E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975) and Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976), which were attacked as scientifically wrong as well as politically motivated. As the sociobiologists kept pleading their innocence, the critics moved their assault to more scientific issues while retaining their political suspicions. We had here complete worldviews in conflict (Defenders of the Truth, Segerstrale, 2000). But now it has happened again! There is now a new sociobiology controversy – initiated by E.O. Wilson himself this time. Wilson says it is time for the popular paradigm of ‘kin selection’ to be replaced by group selection when it comes to the evolution of cooperation. Read more Thursday, March 31, 2016 *LSE 104*, 12:00pm-1:00pm

Next week's seminar

Brian Smith Professor, School of Life Sciences Arizona State University The roles of social networks in disease transmission and individual decision making using the honey bee as a model Social insects are highly successful because of the coordination of activities of many individuals. These social networks function in many different contexts, including finding food, defense of a colony and fighting disease. In honey bees, formation of a social network depends on establishing behavioral castes composed of subsets of workers. As workers age they progress through a series of functions for the colony that range from caring for brood and the queen, to cleaning and building the nest, to nest defense and foraging for nectar and pollen. Progression through these tasks is roughly correlated with age and influenced by a worker’s genotype. However, the rate of progression through these tasks is also responsive to signals from the colony’s environment which accelerate or regress behavioral development. Research has therefore revealed a lot about the genotype x environment interactions that regulate how individuals respond to environmental contingencies the colony faces. Read more Thursday, April 7, 2016