Introduction

The revised vision of the colony requires a new view of social insect evolution. This is not to say that the supraorganismic qualities of social insect colonies are not important: certainly insofar as the group is vital to individual reproductive success, inherited tendancies promoting the survival and well-being of the group must be favored under natural selection at the individual and genie levels. A few highly specialized social insects have colonies approaching a supraorganismic level of integration, and it is of great interest to discern the ecological and phylogenetic circumstances under which they occur. The most "supraorganismic" social insect colonies — those with morphologically specialized worker subcastes and highly differentiated physogastric queens — have long-lived monogynous queens. Thus they are the social insects which most closely approach multicellular organisms in having a high degree of genetic uniformity of component parts and, consequently, a low degree of internal conflict of interests.