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      Demography, life history and the evolution of age-dependent social behaviour.

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          Abstract

          Since the inception of modern social evolution theory, a vast majority of studies have sought to explain cooperation using relatedness-driven hypotheses. Natural populations, however, show a substantial amount of variation in social behaviour that is uncorrelated with relatedness. Age offers a major alternative explanation for variation in behaviour that remains unaccounted for. Most natural populations are structured into age-classes, with ageing being a nearly universal feature of most major taxa, including eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms. Despite this, the theoretical underpinnings of age-dependent social behaviour remain limited. Here, I investigate how group age-composition, demography and life history shape trajectories of age-dependent behaviours that are expressed conditionally on an actor and recipient's age. I show that demography introduces novel age-dependent selective pressures acting on social phenotypes. Furthermore, I find that life history traits influence the costs and benefits of cooperation directly, but also indirectly. Life history has a strong impact not only on the genetic structure of the population but also on the distribution of group age-compositions, with both of these processes influencing the expression of age-dependent cooperation. Age of peak reproductive performance, in particular, is of chief importance for the evolution of cooperation, as this will largely determine the age and relatedness of social partners. Moreover, my results suggest that later-life reproductive senescence may occur because of demographic effects alone, which opens new vistas on the evolution of menopause and related phenomena.

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          Author and article information

          Journal
          J. Evol. Biol.
          Journal of evolutionary biology
          Wiley
          1420-9101
          1010-061X
          Sep 2018
          : 31
          : 9
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
          [2 ] Wolfson College, Cambridge, UK.
          Article
          10.1111/jeb.13308
          29904961
          f9b47c10-66b3-47e3-bea9-d473aefa4c45
          History

          kin selection,population viscosity,reproductive value,senescence,dispersal,inclusive fitness

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