Department of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0116, USA.
Q Rev Biol. 2010 Mar;85(1):57-79. doi: 10.1086/650290.
Our understanding of insect societies is rapidly expanding due to an emphasis on integrative approaches. Emerging tools enabling the molecular dissection of social behavior, together with novel hypotheses for the evolution of eusociality, are emblematic of this progress. However, an obstacle to a truly integrative approach remains, as social physiology--the basis of group-level coordination--has generally been neglected by geneticists. In this paper, we begin a synthesis of these fields by first reviewing three classes of social insect organization that mark major transitions in increasing social complexity. We then develop an expansion of the superorganism concept in order to place eusociality into a broad evolutionary context, and we also interpret current molecular and genetic work on the evolution of eusociality. The ground plan hypothesis proposes that eusociality arose via simple changes in the regulation of ancestral gene sets affecting reproductive physiology and behavior, and we argue that this hypothesis is explanatory for the evolution of division of labor (social anatomy) but not for the regulatory systems that ensure group-level coordination of action (social physiology), which we propose is dependent on previously unrelated traits that are brought together into novel genetic networks. We conclude with a review of recent work in sociogenomics that supports our hypotheses.
由于强调综合方法，我们对昆虫社会的理解正在迅速扩展。新兴的工具使我们能够对社会行为进行分子剖析，同时也为真社会性的进化提出了新的假设，这标志着这方面的进展。然而，由于遗传学家普遍忽略了社会生理学（群体协调的基础），因此，要真正实现综合方法仍然存在障碍。在本文中，我们首先回顾了三种组织形式的社会性昆虫，这些组织形式标志着社会复杂性不断增加的重大转变，从而开始对这些领域进行综合。然后，我们扩展了超个体的概念，以便将真社会性置于广泛的进化背景下，我们还解释了当前关于真社会性进化的分子和遗传研究。基础方案假说提出，真社会性是通过影响生殖生理学和行为的祖先基因调控的简单变化而产生的，我们认为，该假说可以解释分工（社会解剖学）的进化，但不能解释确保行动的群体协调的调节系统（社会生理学）的进化，我们认为，社会生理学依赖于以前不相关的特征，这些特征被整合到新的遗传网络中。最后，我们对支持我们假说的社会基因组学的最新研究进行了综述。
