New paper is out!
Disease is often seen as a cost of social life. But can it also shape how complex societies evolve?
Here, we use mathematical models to study social immunity: collective disease defence in ants, termites, bees and other group-living insects.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
This can create a feedback loop: safer colonies can grow larger, and larger colonies may gain even more from collective protection.
In short, disease may not just be a cost of social life — it may also help shape the evolution of social complexity.
