David Queller

Biosketch

David Queller is an evolutionary biologist known for his work on the evolution of social behavior. A main theme of his work has been kin selection and the way it affects the interactions among relatives in animals, plants, and microbes. He earned a B.A. in history and philosophy of science at the University of Illinois (1976), followed by a PhD in biological sciences at the University of Michigan (1983). After a postdoctoral year at the University of Sussex, he became the Julian Huxley Instructor at Rice University (1984), eventually rising to be Harry Carothers and Olga Keith Wiess Professor. In 2011 he moved to Washington University in St. Louis as Spencer T. Olin Professor of Biology. He has been a J.S. Guggenheim Fellow (1988), a fellow of Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2018-9), and won the Hamilton Award of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology (2018). He has also been elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Animal Behavior Society. He is married to Joan Strassmann and has three children.

Research Interests

David Queller has focused his research on one of the great evolutionary problems, the evolution of cooperation and conflict. His theoretical work showed both the simplicity of kin selection and how it relates to other types of social evolution. He conceptual contributions include distinguish fraternal and egalitarian major transitions in evolution and the fortress defender and life insurer routes to eusociality. He has made major advances in three kingdoms of life. His PhD work extended social evolution theory to plants, showing empirically how sexual selection works on flowers and theoretically how kin selection generates multiparty evolutionary conflicts in seeds. Subsequent work, much of it with Joan Strassmann, showed the importance of kin selection and relatedness in social insects. He pioneered the use of highly variably microsatellites to estimate relatedness and developed widely used statistics for generating these estimates. He proposed new theories for how extended offspring dependence can select for eusociality and for how genomic imprinting could affect many aspects of social insect life. More recent work, again with Strassmann, has focused on the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. Using methods from experimental evolution, genomics, and molecular evolution, they showed how the evolutionary theory of cooperation also applies to microbes and revealed unexpected social abilities such as altruism, cheating, kin recognition, and greenbeard genes.