ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2025
Linking individual fitness to the evolution of cognition.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- How does cognition determine an individual's fitness? A systematic review of the links between cognition, behaviour and fitness in non-human animals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Pooled it
- Selection shapes diverse animal minds.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The coevolution of cognition and sociality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
It is well supported that the present diversity of animal cognitive abilities is the result of evolutionary processes, driven at least in part by natural selection. However, the evolutionary dynamics that link individual traits to fitness to macroevolutionary patterns of variation in cognition are much less clear. Is cognitive evolution fast or slow? Does selection tend to act on existing genetic variation or is adaptive cognitive evolution mutation limited? Is there a consistent pattern to the mode and tempo of cognitive evolution across groups or does it vary depending on different social and ecological pressures? Answering these questions will allow us to understand the connections between heritable variation in cognition in extant populations and the divergence in cognitive abilities across species. We review what is currently known about cognition and individual variation in fitness and discuss how fitness observed in current populations may be linked with patterns of natural selection. We provide a brief overview of relevant concepts from the population genomics literature and suggest a research agenda that integrates behavioural ecological approaches with comparative and population genomics data to uncover the patterns of cognition evolution.This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue 'Selection shapes diverse animal minds'.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.