The Evolution of Society

Stuart West is the Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Oxford University.  He is a Royal Society University Research Fellow whose research interests are in the field of social evolution, especially issues such as cooperation, altruism, virulence and sex allocation. 

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Jeremy Field is Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Sussex, UK. His B.A. and PhD in Zoology were from Cambridge University UK and were followed by postdoctoral fellowships at Imperial College London, Cambridge University and Rice University in Texas.  From 1995 he was a member of the Biology Department at UCL in London, before taking up his current position at Sussex in 2007.  His research focusses on the behavioural and evolutionary ecology of animal societies, using wasps and bees as models. He is particularly interested in the fundamental question of how helping behaviour evolves and is maintained. 

Jacobus J. (Koos) Boomsma is Professor of Animal Ecology at the University of Copenhagen and Director of the Centre for Social Evolution (http://www1.bio.ku.dk/english/research/oe/cse/). He trained in ecology, evolutionary biology and behavior ( Amsterdam, Utrecht, Oxford, Cornell) and was a lecturer at the University of Aarhus (1990-1999), before taking up his present position. His research has mainly focused on testing predictions from kin-selection theory about reproductive conflicts. This work primarily used ants as model systems and has contributed evolutionary insights in sex allocation and the expression and regulation of social conflicts, both within families and in mutualistic symbioses with microorganisms. He has also worked on mating system evolution, social parasitism in insect societies, the social forces that contain the spread of infectious diseases, and the evolutionary biology of invasive ants. 

David Queller earned his B.S. from the University of Illinois in history and philosophy of science.  He switched to biology for grad school at the University of Michigan, where he had the extraordinary fortune to be taught by Richard Alexander, Bill Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, and Mary Jane West-Eberhard (the last three as semester-long visitors).  His early work applied social evolution theory to plants, including the male nature of showy flowers and kin-selected conflict and cooperation during seed development.  Since 1984 he has been working on the evolution of cooperation at Rice University, in collaboration with Joan Strassmann, where both currently hold the title of Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor in Natural Sciences.  For many years they studied social insects, especially wasps, combining field studies with new methods to estimate genetic relatedness.  They now work primarily on a social amoeba, using this lab model organism to understand cooperation at the genetic level.  Queller has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a Fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

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Biography not yet available

Francis Ratnieks is Professor of Apiculture at the University of Sussex and head of LASI, the Laboratory of Apiculture & Social Insects. He took his PhD in the Department of Entomology at Cornell University in New York State. During his PhD he also worked for the New York State Apiary Inspection Service doing research on honey bee diseases and providing information to beekeepers about disease management and identification. He is also a part time beekeeper, owning 180 hives when he lived in California. His research is focused on honey bees and social insects and addresses both basic and applied questions. One current area of research is on the control of honey bee diseases, including natural disease resistance via ‘hygienic behaviour’ in honey bees and stingless bees. He recently set up a research spin off business, LASI Queen Bees, to supply bees bred for high levels of hygienic behaviour to beekeepers.

Marc Hauser's research sits at the interface between evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience and is aimed at understanding the processes and consequences of cognitive evolution.  Observations and experiments focus on humans and nonhuman animals, incorporating methodological procedures and theoretical insights from behavioral ecology, infant cognitive development, evolutionary theory, cognitive neuroscience, biological anthropology, linguistics and philosophy.

Current foci include: the nature of our moral judgments, the computations subserving our language faculty, the evolution of cooperation, economic decision making, conceptual representations in the domains of mathematics, space, language and music, and animal communication.

Hauser received a BS in Animal Behavior from Bucknell University and a PhD from UCLA.  Currently, Hauser is a Harvard College Professor, and Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, and Biological Anthropology. He is the co-director of the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program at Harvard, and adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of Education and the Department of Anthropology. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, a Medal of Science from the College de France, and a Guggenheim Award. He has published 6 books, including most recently Moral Minds (2006, Harper Collins/Little Brown. 

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Tim Clutton-Brock is the Prince Philip Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Cambridge. His research has explored the evolutionary causes and ecological consequences of variation in reproductive strategies and social behaviour in a wide range of natural systems, using a combination of field experiments, detailed analyses of individual differences in reproductive success and interspecific comparisons. In particular, he has initiated and developed long term studies of several naturally regulated populations of mammals (including red deer, Soay sheep and Kalahari meerkats), using them to investigate the pay offs of different reproductive strategies, the costs and benefits of competition and cooperation and the evolution of sex differences in behaviour and development.  His work has also investigated the regulation of population density in mammals, the effects of variation in density climate at the individual and population level and the interaction between population dynamics and selection. 

Clive Gamble is a Fellow of the British Academy and Professor in the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Southampton. His recent projects include the British Academy’s Centenary Project ‘From Lucy to language: the archaeology of the social brain’ (2004-2011) which brought together archaeologists and psychologists to study when hominin brains became human minds. This is the subject of his two most recent books ‘Settling the Earth: the archaeology of deep human history’ (2013) and ‘Thinking big: how the evolution of social life shaped the human mind’ (2014 with John Gowlett and Robin Dunbar). He is currently leading two major projects funded by the AHRC and Leverhulme Trust; the first examines thresholds in hominin behaviour at the site of La Cotte de St Brelade, Jersey, and the second the beginnings of food storage in the late Pleistocene of Europe.

Robert W. Boyd was born in Buffalo, New York. He received the B.S. degree in physics from MIT and the PhD degree in physics from the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of Charles Townes. Professor Boyd joined the faculty of the University of Rochester in 1977 and in 2001 became the M Parker Givens Professor of Optics and Professor of Physics.  In 2010 he became Professor of Physics and Canada Excellence Research Chair in Quantum Nonlinear Optics at the University of Ottawa. His research interests include studies of “slow” and “fast” light propagation, quantum imaging techniques, nonlinear optical interactions, studies of the nonlinear optical properties of materials, and the development of photonic devices including photonic biosensors.  He is the 2009 recipient of the Willis E. Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Optics, the 2010 recipient of a Humboldt Research Prize, and the 2014 recipient of Quantum Electronics Award of the IEEE Photonics Society.

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Biography not yet available