Can we stop the crap about "selfishness" and "altruism" when discussing animal behavior?  It's absolutely ridiculous the unnatural gyrations researchers go through to try and reconcile behaviors that clearly don't fit the prevailing theories.

The present "explanation" demonstrates how the altruistic behavior of some wasps (Polistes dominulus) is actually "selfish".  What kind of rubbish is this?

The point was to salvage kin selection theory (which it doesn't do), by arguing that some wasps may behave "altruistically" towards unrelated queens simply so that they may "selfishly" inherit the hive and thereby gain (or improve) their own genetic fitness.

The problem is that this explains NOTHING!

According to biology, "altruism" has a very specific definition which REQUIRES that an act can only be considered altruistic if it incurs a fitness cost to the actor, while providing a fitness benefit to the recipient.  This does not occur in this situation, since the benefit accrues to the original actor.  Therefore, whatever else they want to call it, it doesn't demonstrate altruism; by definition.

More to the point, this definition goes to great lengths to argue that without a cost being incurred, then regardless of the outcome, an act cannot be considered altruistic.  This separates the concept of "altruism" from the act, which may only have a potential for incurring cost, to a specific definition where only cost is considered as a defining characteristic.

It also doesn't explain kin selection theory, since the help being provided is not being provided between genetically related siblings.

In fact, it defies kin selection's explanation, because when a hive is "inherited", then all the unrelated members of the hive are working for a queen to whom they are unrelated and supporting her offspring whom are equally unrelated.  This is completely off the mark regarding the predictions of kin selection theory.  At minimum, kin selection would not be applicable to the queen, but only to the workers in the hive.  So, by kin selection, the unrelated workers should abandon the hive when a new queen takes over, since they will have lost out at all levels.

So with the absence of actual altruism, and no kin selection occurring, this is simply an example of trying to fit data into a theory that fails to account for actual events.  It's nonsense.