Professor Rebecca Kilner FRS

Rebecca Kilner’s research focuses on the relationship between social behaviour and evolution. With experiments in the field and the laboratory, Rebecca has derived novel general insights into the evolution of social behaviour and demonstrated how social behaviour can, in turn, affect evolution.

Rebecca’s work on birds and insects has revealed hidden adaptations within the family that balance evolutionary cooperation against evolutionary conflict. She has shown how adults cooperate to provision offspring yet remain vulnerable to manipulation by a lazy partner; how siblings are rivals for resources yet can cooperate to obtain more food; and how offspring reliably advertise their need to provisioning parents yet can seek more food than is optimal for parents to supply.

Whereas her initial work showed how social behaviour is the outcome of adaptive evolution, her most recent research has demonstrated how social behaviour contributes to further evolutionary change: by acting as a ‘hidden’ agent of natural selection, by changing the pace at which traits change in response to selection, and providing diverse mechanisms for the non-genetic inheritance of key fitness-related traits.

Rebecca is also Head of the Department of Zoology, which includes the University Museum of Zoology, located on the New Museums Site close to Pembroke. The Department has diverse research interests in the very broad research areas of Ecology, Evolution and Conservation, spanning all levels of biological organisation from molecules and cells to organisms and ecosystems. It shares the David Attenborough Building with to the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, a unique collaboration between university academics and NGOs working internationally to mitigate the ongoing biodiversity crisis.