No Sword Bites So Fiercly as an Evil Tongue? Gossip Wrecks Reputation, but Enhances Cooperation (EVILTONGUE)

Life on Earth has two remarkable properties. One is variation. Apart from the vast number of extant species, considerable variation exists within species, between individuals. The other important properties of life is sociality, as Robert Trivers aptly put: "Everybody has a social life". It is surprising that until recently the interactions between these two properties have rarely been addressed from an evolutionary point of view. Here I overview studies on a special kind of individual
variation: personality in insect. Then I present models which show how individual variation can affect the evolution of cooperation.