Clara B. Jones

Social Ethology: South American Hystricognath #rodents-- we want to study & compare Ctenomyidae [more specialized] & Octodontidae [less specialized]... #Mammals

my closest friend in grad school @Cornell was way more advanced than i was; she was first author on a paper in @nature in her second year... soon after publication, she decided to drop out, & i asked her, why?-- she replied: "It's too easy to fail."

early paper [1964] on "aunt-infant" interactions ["allomothering"]... Thelma Rowell... Robert Hinde... #Primates... #Mammals... https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1965-04489-001 …

anyone reading the 2 publications by @ccgrueter et al. on "multilevel societies" might familiarize themselves with definitions, measurement[s], & usages of the term, "social" and the mechanism, "social evolution" in the fields, Primatology, Sociology, & Social Psychology... 11/

owe their readers a logical argument showing how sociality evolves by sociality itself-- to my knowledge, a unique hypothesis in the literature on the evolution of groups & the evolution of sociality... perhaps, the esteemed journal, @Trends_Ecol_Evo , will allocate space... 9/

explain the assumptions upon which their paper rests; the working definitions of the terms they employ; and, most important, how Social Evolution occurs by their mechanism-- that "social" behavior selects for sociality ["societies"]... at minimum, thus, @ccgrueter et al.... 8/

the purported topic of the work advanced by @ccgrueter & his colleagues... at minimum, then, the reader requires that these authors-- in their original paper to the esteemed journal @Trends_Ecol_Evo and in their response to a comment by D Papageorgiou & @DamienFarine ... 7/

groups are formed in the first place [c.f. JH Crook (1964) Behaviour Supplement X, and, most important, the literature addressing the generally-accepted principles whereby groups are maintained in Time & Space which may or may not lead to the #evolution of sociality--... 6/

[complex] sociality, generally, understood in the literature on Social Evolution from a "major transitions" approach [e.g., opi cit.]... this non-standard perspective ignores the WD Hamiltonian Project, as well as, the conventionally-understood mechanisms whereby... 5/

accept the fundamental assumption of Greuter's 2 publications in one of the most highly-respected journals @Trends_Ecol_Evo of #Ecology & #Evolution, readers are asked to accept an implied, unique process that iterated interindividual interactions themselves, select for... 4/

to tie their phenomena to the respected literature on the evolution of Social Complexity as per West et al (2015) PNAS @StuWest8 @drandygardner, as well as, the "major transitions" approach to Social Evolution as per P Cooper & SA West (2018) @NatureEcoEvo ... in order to... 3/

... their "architecture" is differentiated [see their original paper]; because the same individuals constituting the clusters within "levels" interact repeatedly; and, because the "architectures" they purportedly describe exhibit "individuality" [no doubt attempting... 2/

Michael Cant, U Exeter, UK, has recently established eusocial #termites ["social #cockroaches"] in his lab to study aspects of social #biology...

Rhetorical statement: i don't so much understand what "network" researchers are doing with clusters of individuals at the population level-- how these studies might be related, say, to social #evolution; however, the approach seems well-suited to Community #Ecology research

"group size effects in social #evolution"... Games... https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3176517 …

when a researcher defines, "social" as "interindividual interactions," she is, by definition, studying interactions between Actor [initiator] & Recipient-- a phenomenon that must be subjected to mainstream assumptions & analyses [e.g., optimization; the Hamiltonian Project]...

Social #Ethology: i think i've never read a paper in primatology discussing putative #cooperation that addresses the idea that mothers minimize allocation of E to current offspring to invest in future offspring... or that addresses Genetic Conflict between Actor & Recipient...