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Testing rationality of decision-making and choice by evaluating the mathematical property of transitivity has a long tradition in biology, economics, psychology, and zoology. This paradigm is fraught with conceptual, mathematical, and statistical pitfalls. In this overview, we tackle five major obstacles. One challenge lies in spelling out what transitivity of latent preferences really says and what it actually implies about observable choice behavior. Most notably, this step is fraught with aggregation artifacts, in that aggregated behavior can be profoundly misleading about individual behavior. Another hurdle comes from hard mathematical problems associated with characterizing the properties of heterogeneous transitive populations. A third challenge is the prevalence of straw man hypotheses in this area of research. The fourth difficulty is associated with adopting appropriate statistical inference tools that correctly accommodate the idiosyncratic mathematical properties of order-constrained statistical hypotheses. The fifth hurdle arises with the role of scientific parsimony in rationality research. We walk readers through key concepts, mathematical models, and statistical techniques for testing rationality. Throughout, we provide examples using the methods and data of two prominent published papers on animal choice behavior as our case studies. We explain how these papers tackled the five hurdles to varying degrees of success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our understanding of insect societies is rapidly expanding due to an emphasis on integrative approaches. Emerging tools enabling the molecular dissection of social behavior, together with novel hypotheses for the evolution of eusociality, are emblematic of this progress. However, an obstacle to a truly inlegrative approach remains, as social physiology--the basis of group-level coordination--has generally been neglected by geneticists. In this paper, we begin a synthesis of these fields by first reviewing three classes of social insect organization that mark major transitions in increasing social complexity. We then develop an expansion of the superorganism concept in order to place eusociality into a broad evolutionary context, and we also interpret current molecular and genetic work on the evolution of eusociality. The groundplan hypothesis proposes that eusociality arose via simple, changes in the regulation of ancestral gene sets affecting reproductive physiology and behavior, and we argue that this hypothesis is explanatory for the evolution of division of labor (social anatomy) but not for the regulatory systems that ensure group-level coordination of action (social physiology), which we propose is dependent on previously unrelated trails that are brought together into novel genetic networks. We conclude with a review of recent work in sociogenomics that supports our hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]