Inaugural Lecture by Professor Nathan Bailey Social control

What determines the physical structure and behaviour of an individual animal? This talk addresses the evolutionary tension between every organism's own genetic instruction manual — its genome — and the influences of a lifetime of social interactions with others. I argue that the social environment places enormous strain on populations and that the capacity to cope with that strain is more important than previously appreciated in determining whether populations survive or go extinct. I will guide the audience through this logic by charting my own scientific development and research findings on the evolution of communication and social behaviour in insects. This work suggests cautionary lessons for human beings.