title: Genes, bees and ecosystems: The evolution of a common interest among individuals.
abstract: Adam Smith proposed that individuals can share sufficient interest in their society's welfare to profit by cooperating for its benefit and by jointly suppressing behavior hurtful to it. Similarly, a genome's genes share a common interest in 'honest' meiosis, which ensures that alleles can spread only by benefitting their carriers. Honeybee workers express a common interest in raising their queen's, rather than their half-sisters', eggs by eating eggs laid by half sisters. Can analogous principles explain the evolution of harmony at other levels of biological organization, such as ecosystems or organismic development?
authors.affiliation: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Apartado 2072, Balboa, Panama.
authors.forename: E G
authors.initials: EG
authors.lastname: Leigh