Modelling the role of environmental circumscription in the evolution of inequality.

Circumscription theory proposes that complex hierarchical societies emerged in areas surrounded by barriers to dispersal, e.g. mountains or seas.

Playing the political game: the coevolution of institutions with group size and political inequality.

All societies need to form institutional rules to regulate their social interactions. These specify what actions individuals should take in particular situations, and what sanctions will apply if individuals violate these rules. However, forming these institutional rules involves playing a political game-a process of negotiation between individuals that is costly and time-consuming.

An investigation of the role of leadership in consensus decision-making.

Leadership is a widespread phenomena in social organisms and it is recognised to facilitate coordination between individuals. While the role of leadership in group foraging or swarm movement is well understood, it is not clear if leaders would also benefit more complex forms of coordination. In particular, a number of organisms coordinate by consensus decision-making, where individuals explicitly communicate their opinions until they converge toward a common decision.

The evolution of moral rules in a model of indirect reciprocity with private assessment.

Moral rules allow humans to cooperate by indirect reciprocity. Yet, it is not clear which moral rules best implement indirect reciprocity and are favoured by natural selection. Previous studies either considered only public assessment, where individuals are deemed good or bad by all others, or compared a subset of possible strategies.

The cultural evolution and ecology of institutions.

Human societies are structured by what we refer to as 'institutions', which are socially created and culturally inherited proscriptions on behaviour that define roles and set expectations about social interactions. The study of institutions in several social science fields has provided many important insights that have not been fully appreciated in the evolutionary human sciences. However, such research has often lacked a shared understanding of general processes of change that shape institutional diversity across space and time.

Predation shapes the impact of cancer on population dynamics and the evolution of cancer resistance.

Cancer is a widespread disease that affects most of the metazoans. However, cancer development is a slow process and, long before causing the death of the individual, may weaken organisms' capacities and impair their interactions with other species. Yet, the impact of cancer development on biotic interactions, and over the dynamics of the whole ecosystem, is still largely unexplored.

From disorganized equality to efficient hierarchy: how group size drives the evolution of hierarchy in human societies.

A manifest trend is that larger and more productive human groups shift from distributed to centralized decision-making. Voluntary theories propose that human groups shift to hierarchy to limit scalar stress, i.e.