Tom Wenseleers

Very happy to see our new study on the evolution of eusociality come out in Evolution Letters! Our study is the first to experimentally manipulate the proportion of females that stay and help to simulate incipient sociality & assess fitness impact of helping. 🧵

* correct link with population genetic model appendix: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/lq8qb...

* sorry and I meant "convex relationship" :-)

Thanks to first author Viviana Di Pietro for the fantastic work & to @ricaliari.bsky.social for overseeing the experimental work in Spain & @fwovlaanderen.bsky.social for funding! And to @andygardner.bsky.social, @lufromha.bsky.social, @kokkonut.bsky.social & @shikharabhat.bsky.social for comments!

Supplemental material with model details here www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/kpumz... and Mathematica notebook with the eusociality model here www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/h7ery...

(PDF) Early-season helping yields increasing returns to scale at the onset of eusociality PDF | The evolution of eusociality, characterized by cooperative brood care, reproductive division of labor, and overlapping generations, represents a... | Find, read and cite all the research you nee...

Link to paper here www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Overall, our work clarifies how demographic benefits of early cooperation can cause eusociality to evolve more easily, thereby providing a new perspective on a major evolutionary transition and resolving a long-standing paradox.

Theoretical results show that the observed benefits of helping readily allow for the evolution of eusociality, although most readily so with alleles of large effect (penetrance parameter P=1, bottom row) & under single mating (me=1), when sib-sib relatedness is high.

We then use our experimental data to parameterize a population genetic model for the evolution of eusociality, with opposing among-group & within-group selection on a eusociality allele.

Theoretically, we show that these nonlinearities arise from compounding effects of helping early on: workers produced early on help to produce more workers before dispersing sexuals are produced.

Our experimental data from Polistes gallicus paper wasps show that there is a concave relationship between the final number of sexuals reared and the proportion of females that stay & help. This shows there are large benefits of helping, but that these are also highly nonlinear.

Very happy to see our new study on the evolution of eusociality come out in Evolution Letters! Our study is the first to experimentally manipulate the proportion of females that stay and help to simulate incipient sociality & assess fitness impact of helping. 🧵

We are delighted that our Winter Meeting 2025 in Leuven 🇧🇪 is approaching!

Abstract submissions now open: www.iussi-nweurope.org/meetings

Date: December 18-19
Abstract deadline: October 15
Host: Laboratory of Socioecology and Social Evolution at KU Leuven
Plenary: Ido Pen & @rmash.bsky.social

Free PDF of a highly recommended book: "High-Dimensional Regression Modeling" (2024) by Patrick Breheny and Jian Huang. myweb.uiowa.edu/pbreheny/7240/s25/book.pdf with reproducible R code at github.com/pbreheny/hdrm. Accompanying lecture notes & R scripts here: myweb.uiowa.edu/pbreheny/724....

📌North-West European IUSSI Winter Meeting 2025

We are happy to announce that our next meeting on the 18–19 December 2025 will be in Leuven, Belgium, hosted by @twenseleers.bsky.social and his team.

Plenary speakers: Ido Pen & Rahia Mashoodh @rmash.bsky.social

More details to follow 🐝🐜🪳🪲

Dave Queller and colleagues have written about this - you can check out royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1... royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.... www.cell.com/current-biol... The PDFs are on Sci-Hub I believe (sci-hub.hkvisa.net).

How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers? Tackling a touchy subject, genetic detective finds only 1% of European children have unexpected paternity

Honoured to see an article about my research on extra-pair paternity in @science.org. Many thanks to journalist @spoke32.bsky.social for the story and to all colleagues for their quotes!
Hopefully, future visitors to my office will be less surprised by a (reproduction) 17th-century painting...

Big congrats Maarten!

Assessing the role of children in the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium using perturbation analysis - Nature Communications Estimating the contribution of different age groups to COVID-19 epidemic dynamics is complicated by changing variants, non-pharmaceutical interventions, and vaccination levels. Here, the authors use l...

Cool new article out in Nature Communications by @hensniel.bsky.social and colleagues: "Assessing the role of children in the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium using perturbation analysis". www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Well Swiss NSF has 15% overhead and Belgian FWO has 6% overhead. But hard to compare countries...

Yes I get that - a greater share of the operating costs of European universities is state funded compared to in US public universities. But I would still find it a little excessive that for a 1 million USD grant 0.5 million would be needed to pay for the heating & cleaning of my lab & admin support.

What do you mean exactly? It just struck me that those high overheads in the US don't seem to translate into making their universities more democratic. Tuition fees are sky high. But OK taxes are a little higher in Europe...

In Belgium the overhead on FWO projects is 6% and the Swiss NSF has 15% overhead. EU horizon 25%. Why are the percentages so much higher in the US?

If you opted-in then in principle - yes, any confidential fine grained facts could leak into the next model. But not if you opt out. Example above is a bit more tricky: the student could opt in, but the lecturer might prefer this material not to be used as training material for the next model...

How your data is used to improve model performance | OpenAI Help Center Learn more about how OpenAI uses content from our services to improve and train our models.

Well from what is written there it seems if you opt in they can use your chats to help train subsequent models & presumably also use it for the RLHF part. But before doing so they would remove any personal information. So in example above the course material could become part of the training set.

That option of allowing your data to be used for the next model can be switched on or off in the settings... But yes, a bit tricky potentially when people are pasting in copyrighted material. I recall that when you paste in PDFs you are not allowed to publicly share those conversations though.

Happy New Year to you all! My Christmas holidays involved helping my son make a DNA molecule model using a 3D pen & getting a new pet for him: leaf insects! Great fun!

In first grade we just demonstrated a Makeblock robot with a mobile phone mounted on its back with ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode, to pretend the robot was able to talk! The kids & teacher absolutely loved it! It answered all the kids' questions for a full hour! It could even talk with a robot voice!

Well since it needed about twice as much time to do the 35 questions (almost 40 minutes instead of the 25 allowed minutes) it was not particularly fast no. With 40 minutes it got an IQ of 88. For a vision AI that's very good - other vision AIs only get around 70. But I had expected more...

That's definitely not true - in nearly all of the benchmarks ChatGPT o1-preview comes out as the best model & for most of my coding needs & scientific work it works admirably well. An IQ score of 88 is still quite a good score for a vision AI. Previously, the best vision AIs only got around 70.