{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.008970976253298154, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.216393442622951, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
OPTIMIZATION IN EVOLUTION

In the tradition of most, if not all, of the monographs in the Princeton University Press series on population biology, this book provides an original and provocative view of an important evolutionary problem. The many unusual characteristics of social insects have stimulated biologists to examine those species in detail and out of proportion to their frequency. In this book, Oster and Wilson concentrate on the ecological and evolutionary aspects of behavioral and morphological castes. They review the available information on castes and then construct a series of models relating the properties of castes and the composition of a colony to colony function and reproduction. The review of the natural history of castes in social insects is very clear and informative and the development and presentation of the mathematical models is carefully done with sufficient attention to the underlying assumptions and some of the mathematical subtleties. The mathematical sections are certainly not for the faint of heart but Oster and Wilson are convincing in their argument that the complexity of the biological problem warrants the complexity of the mathematics. The book is concerned primarily with the composition of a colony, the numbers of individuals in different castes, and the overall function of the colony. The models are primarily economic models in which the optimal properties of castes and the optimal composition is found under various constraints. Little attention is paid to the mechanisms of regulating individual behavior or colony composition. The use of economic models is discussed at great length and justified by arguing that it is the overall success as measured by the number of reproductives of the colony that natural selection would tend to maximize. The reproductive success would then be maximized by maximizing the efficiency of the col-