Origin of an evolutionary novelty: the worker phenotype of eusocial wasps

Complex problems in evolutionary biology can be approached in two ways, top down using theoretical constructs and bottom up using empirical studies . Theoretical concepts predominate evolutionary interpretations of eusociality in a literature that is small relative to an enormous literature of natural history and basic research that is not synthesized into a conceptual whole. Here, I draw insights from this literature to show how paper wasps’...