Journal
STUDIES IN HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE PART C-STUDIES IN HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGICAL AND BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES
Volume 38, Issue 4, Pages 820-833Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
DOI: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2007.09.008
Keywords
Cooperation; Altruism; Kin selection; Group selection; Communication; Cell-cell signalling
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The study of cooperation and altruism, almost since its inception, has been carried out without reference to the most numerous, diverse and very possibly most cooperative domain of life on the planet: bacteria. This is starting to change, for good reason. Far from being clonal loners, bacteria are highly social creatures capable of astonishingly complex collective behaviour that is mediated, as it is in colonial insects, by chemical communication. The article discusses recent experiments that explore different facets of current theories of the evolution and maintenance of cooperation using bacterial models. Not only do bacteria hold great promise as experimentally tractable, rapidly evolving systems for testing hypotheses, bacterial experiments have already raised interesting questions about the assumptions on which our current understanding of cooperation and altruism rests. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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