Research in my group focuses on the relationship between social behaviour and evolution. With experiments in the field and the laboratory, we have derived novel general insights into the evolution of social behaviour and demonstrated how social behaviour can, in turn, affect evolution.
Our work on birds and insects has revealed hidden adaptations within the family that balance evolutionary cooperation against evolutionary conflict. We have shown how adults cooperate to provision offspring yet remain vulnerable to manipulation by a lazy partner; how siblings are rivals for resources yet can cooperate to obtain more food; and how offspring reliably advertise their need to provisioning parents yet can seek more food than is optimal for parents to supply.
Whereas our initial work showed how social behaviour is the outcome of adaptive evolution, our most recent research has demonstrated how social behaviour contributes to further evolutionary change: by acting as a ‘hidden’ agent of natural selection, by changing the pace at which traits change in response to selection, and providing diverse mechanisms for the non-genetic inheritance of key fitness-related traits.
I am also Director of the award-winning Cambridge University Museum of Zoology (and part of the Zoology Department). The Museum is home to a spectacular global collection, encompassing more than two million zoological specimens amassed over the course of more than two centuries. I lead the Museum team in using the collection to promote understanding of animal life in the past, present and future of our planet; and in engaging the Museum’s audiences in diverse interdisciplinary research and educational projects that are targeted at addressing societal inequalities and improving public health, in the aftermath of the global pandemic.