Social behavior occurs in some of the smallest animals as well as some the largest, and the transition from solitary life to sociality is an unsolved evolutionary mystery. The Evolution of Social Wasps examines social behavior in a single lineage of insects, wasps of the family Vespidae. It presents empirical knowledge of social wasps from two approaches: one that focuses on phylogeny and life history; and one that focuses on individual ontogeny, colony development, and population dynamics. It also provides an extensive summary of the existing literature while demonstrating how it can be cloud ... More

Social behavior occurs in some of the smallest animals as well as some the largest, and the transition from solitary life to sociality is an unsolved evolutionary mystery. The Evolution of Social Wasps examines social behavior in a single lineage of insects, wasps of the family Vespidae. It presents empirical knowledge of social wasps from two approaches: one that focuses on phylogeny and life history; and one that focuses on individual ontogeny, colony development, and population dynamics. It also provides an extensive summary of the existing literature while demonstrating how it can be clouded by theory. This approach to the conflicting literature on sociality highlights how often repeated models can become fixed in the thinking of the scientific community. Instead, it presents a mechanistic scenario for the evolution of sociality in wasps that changes our perspective on kin selection, the paradigm that has dominated thinking about social evolution since the 1970s.