The cover of this week's Nature is set to spark debate.

Credit: Nature Publishing Group

SYDNEY: On the hallowed cover of this week's edition of Nature is a paper destined to reignite the flames of a fiery debate that has troubled every generation of biologists since Charles Darwin.

Paying short shrift to the idea of 'kin selection' - which has formed the cornerstone of sociobiological theory for almost half a century - the authors of the offending article propose a contentious new model to explain the evolution of 'eusociality'. (Read a news story about the paper, in Kin selection is dead, says E.O. Wilson).

Eusociality is exhibited by organisms such as ants, wasps and bees, which live in complex, hierarchical social systems - and it has even been used to explain why young men give their lives in war.

Greatest mind of modern biology?

It's the kind of upstart paper evolutionary biologists would normally dismiss as attention-grabbing heresy in an obscure journal.

Problem is, among the heretics is E.O. Wilson, one of the greatest minds in modern biology … and the journal is Nature, one of the most respected. And all three authors are at Harvard, one of the world's top universities.

Not only that, but the British journal even deemed it worthy of the cover, showing two ants head-to-head above the bold headline, "Social services: how standard natural selection explains the evolution of eusociality".

"Liberating the study of social evolution"

Wilson - a scientific provocateur who through his prolific career has revelled in upsetting the status quo - co-authored the paper with mathematical biologists Martin A. Nowak and Corina E. Tarnita.

In the accompanying press release, they pull no punches: "We hope our new theory for the evolution of eusociality will open up sociobiology to new avenues of research by liberating the study of social evolution from mandatory adherence to kin selection theory. After four decades ruling the roost, it is time to recognise this theory's very limited prowess."

Kin selection, and the parent concept of 'inclusive fitness', attempt to explain why individuals perform selfless tasks that will not benefit them directly, but have a fitness payoff for their shared genetic heritage with the family, the tribe - or the hive.

It seeks to explain why individuals take the seemingly paradoxical step of sacrificing their own reproductive potential in order to care for the offspring of relatives.

Biologists: flawed, incorrect, irrelevant study

Most evolutionary biologists are unimpressed. In fact, some had trouble staying calm enough to explain their objections. A straw poll of leading names in sociobiology found almost all were at a loss to explain how such a "flawed" (their words) body of work could have found its way into Nature - let alone onto the front cover.

"The paper is so obviously incorrect that it won't have any impact on the study of eusociality," asserted Stuart West, a professor of evolutionary biology at Britain's University of Oxford who has had a long interest in the evolution of social behaviours. "The proposed model may be of mathematical interest, but it is unfortunately based on a scenario that empirical data show is irrelevant."