Spite seems to be a uniquely human phenomenon, but examining interactions among organisms you’d never peg as vengeful is giving scientists some insight into how the rather nasty behavior arose. It’s difficult to see how spite could evolve: what benefit is there in punishing another party at the cost of harming one’s own reproductive fitness? “Six years ago, no one thought it was possible,” says Oxford University evolutionary biologist Stuart West. Some researchers have suggested that natural selection can favor spite if the recipient is less related to the actor than would be expected by chance. But this circumstance would not be widespread in nature, limited to small populations or to social insect colonies where sterile workers and soldiers have nothing to lose in terms of individual reproductive fitness.
Spite: Evolution Finally Gets Nasty
Hadas Hawlena, a postdoc in evolutionary biologist Curt ...
