Dantzer Ben, Rubenstein Dustin R
Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
Integr Comp Biol. 2017 Sep 1;57(3):560-565. doi: 10.1093/icb/icx093.
Nearly all animals interact with members of their own species at some point during their lives. These behavioral interactions range from courtship, mating, and parental care to the complex cooperative behavior among related or unrelated individuals in group-living species. A number of theoretical models have attempted to explain how cooperation can evolve through natural selection. Although tremendously influential in animal behavior research, these traditional models have largely ignored individual variation in cooperative behavior and its underlying developmental and proximate mechanisms. However, a set of emerging models suggest that the evolution of cooperation can be heavily influenced by the degree of individual variation in cooperative behavior, as well as the complexity of the underlying mechanisms. Yet, while theoreticians argue the importance of studying individual variation in cooperation and the mechanisms underlying it, empiricists have not focused upon these aspects. The main objectives of our symposium at the 2017 meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology is to establish new research avenues to study variation in cooperative behavior using both proximate and ultimate explanations and to produce a road map to study the developmental and proximate mechanisms in generating individual variation in cooperative behavior. This symposium brought together empiricists and theoreticians investigating cooperative behavior in diverse taxa and across multiple levels of analysis. Here we briefly describe the rationale for this symposium and why we thought it was needed as well as provide a brief overview of the contributions.
几乎所有动物在其生命中的某个时刻都会与同类成员进行互动。这些行为互动范围广泛，从求偶、交配和育儿到群居物种中相关或不相关个体之间复杂的合作行为。许多理论模型试图解释合作如何通过自然选择进化而来。尽管这些传统模型在动物行为研究中极具影响力，但它们在很大程度上忽略了合作行为中的个体差异及其潜在的发育和近因机制。然而，一系列新兴模型表明，合作行为的个体差异程度以及潜在机制的复杂性会对合作的进化产生重大影响。然而，虽然理论家们强调研究合作中的个体差异及其潜在机制的重要性，但实证主义者尚未关注这些方面。我们在综合与比较生物学学会2017年会议上举办本次研讨会的主要目标是开辟新的研究途径，利用近因和终极解释来研究合作行为的差异，并制定一个路线图来研究产生合作行为个体差异的发育和近因机制。本次研讨会汇聚了实证主义者和理论家，他们在不同分类群和多个分析层面研究合作行为。在此，我们简要描述本次研讨会的基本原理、我们认为其必要性的原因，并对所做贡献进行简要概述。
