# Talk:Eusociality

Eusociality (Greek εὖ eu "good" and social) is the highest level of organization of sociality. It is defined by the following characteristics: cooperative brood care
The use of the term "highest" is unsupported. Why is this the highest? Why are other forms lower? If there is some commonly recognized standard that ranks levels of sociality it needs to be cited. 
In addition to being unsupported, the definition appears to be stated later: 
Eusociality is distinguished from all other social systems because individuals of at least one caste usually lose the ability to perform behaviors characteristic of individuals in another caste. TABLOYD (talk) 16:37, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for asking. However, Wikipedia articles do not have introductions. Instead, they have a lead section which is solely a summary of the article body. Normally, the lead does not repeat citations, but relies on the citations of the bit of text summarized in each lead sentence. That is the case here. The statement you mention is explained at the top of 'History' and is cited to the work of Suzanne Batra which founded the concept of eusociality; she introduced the hierarchy of levels. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:48, 19 January 2025 (UTC)
Please do not attempt to use this talk page as a forum: it isn't one. Nor are attacks on other editors acceptable anywhere. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:12, 23 February 2025 (UTC)
Please stop your disruptive editing.
If you are engaged in an article content dispute with another editor, discuss the matter on the article's talk page, and seek consensus with them. --- I am not using this as a forum. Respond to my points. Provide better citations. I am not attacking you or other editors, I am proving you wrong. At best this does not deserve the "good article" distinction because there are numerous citations that do not support what they are claimed to. I don't recall if I have them all listed here or not, but this is some of them:

Relevantusername2020 (talk) 20:35, 23 February 2025 (UTC)
Relevantusername2020, I have collapsed the wall of text in the middle of your message. This helps you rather than  hurts you, as nobody will read that (but they still can, if they want). What I would recommend to you is to pick one point of disagreement you have, and explain it along with your reasoning and a (limited!) number of citations to support your ideas, and see what response you get. If you try to do everything at once, it will probably inhibit getting a response to any of them.
You have seen the term not a forum used above, and what that means is that all of your remarks here should address how to best improve the article. You cannot simply expound on the topic of Eusociality based on your own reading of it. If you are getting hung up on this point, what I suggest is to start with one brief, concrete change proposal, state why it is an improvement, and put it up for discussion here. By 'concrete', I mean, "change A to B", or, "Add the following sentence in section A, paragraph 3, after the second sentence: 'Foo bar baz.' " Using the template {{textdiff}} may help. Good luck, Mathglot (talk) 20:34, 6 March 2025 (UTC)
One more thing: you stated above, "there are numerous citations that do not support what they are claimed to". This is something concrete. You could list one citation and the assertion in the article it purports to verify, and discuss what's wrong with it and what should be done about it. Best, Mathglot (talk) 20:43, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

despite a paragraph claiming a desire to move away from the use of the terms primitive and advanced to describe eusociality, both words are used 5 times each to describe various organisms' eusociality.  I'm on my phone on vacation nerding out so I can't change it, so if someone has the time to streamline the page that would be nice. 98.97.64.236 (talk) 01:02, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

You'll note that there is one paper. One. From 1995. That suggests that we drop the use of "primitive" and "advanced". That is not the consensus opinion, not even the majority opinion. It's one opinion, from one paper. it's been 30 years since that paper came out promoting the premise that eusociality is a spectrum that can't be classified that way, and there's no sign that researchers have adopted any alternative, or at least no sign of a desire to move away from the "loaded" terms; I suspect that people consider "primitive" and "advanced" to represent points along a spectrum, so there is only that one paper that quibbles over the terminology. There doesn't appear to be any alternative terminology in use; papers are still being published with "primitively eusocial" in their titles/abstracts, and it's lots of papers, not just a few, all post-1995. Editing the article to reflect a minority opinion as if it was the majority would be a direct violation of WP policy (see WP:UNDUE), so please just leave the article as it is. Dyanega (talk) 15:46, 14 May 2025 (UTC)