Related papers: The Evolution of Sex through the Baldwin Effect
Repeated interaction between individuals is the main mechanism for maintaining cooperation in social dilemma situations. Variants of tit-for-tat (repeating the previous action of the opponent) and the win-stay lose-shift strategy are known…
Natural selection acts on traits at different scales, often with opposing consequences. This article identifies the particular forces that act at each scale and how those forces combine to determine the overall evolutionary outcome. A…
An increasing number of dissident voices claim that the standard neo-Darwinian view of genes as 'leaders' and phenotypes as 'followers' during the process of adaptive evolution should be turned on its head. This idea is older than the…
We consider the dynamics imposed by natural selection on the populations of two competing, sexually reproducing, haploid species. In this setting, the fitness of any genome varies over time due to the changing population mix of the…
We discuss a simple model of co-evolution. In order to emphasise the effect of interaction between individuals the entire population is subjected to the same physical environment. Species are emergent structures and extinction, origination…
The puzzle associated with the cost of sex, an old problem of evolutionary biology, is discussed here from the point of view of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. The results suggest, in a simplified model, that the prevalence of sexual…
We find an advantage of recombination for a category of complex fitness landscapes. Recent studies of empirical fitness landscapes reveal complex gene interactions and multiple peaks, and recombination can be a powerful mechanism for…
An elementary biostatistical theory based on a selectivity-variability principle is proposed to address a question raised by Charles Darwin, namely, how one sex of a sexually dimorphic species might tend to evolve with greater variability…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
Sex chromosomes have independently evolved in species with separate sexes in most lineages across the tree of life. However, the well-accepted canonical model of sex chromosome evolution is not universally supported. There is no single…
Mixing maternal and paternal genomes is the base of plant sexual reproduction, but some so-called 'haploid inducer lines' lead to the formation of seeds bearing well-developed embryos with solely the maternal genome. A recent study adds a…
Maintaining tissue homeostasis requires appropriate regulation of stem cell differentiation. The Waddington landscape posits that gene circuits in a cell form a potential landscape of different cell types, wherein cells follow attractors of…
In multi-cellular organisms, cells differentiate into multiple types as they divide. States of these cell types, as well as their numbers, are known to be robust to external perturbations; as conceptualized by Waddington's epigenetic…
Much has been debated about the benefit of sexual over asexual reproduction in terms of evolutionary fitness. Here we focus on the advantage that may be brought about by the process of mating, where the choosing of mates contributes to the…
We have developed a mathematical model that captures stress-induced mutagenesis, a fundamental aspect of pathogenic and neoplastic evolutionary dynamics, on the fitness landscape with multiple relevant genetic traits as a high-dimensional…
In evolution theory the concept of a fitness landscape has played an important role, evolution itself being portrayed as a hill-climbing process on a rugged landscape. In this article it is shown that in general, in the presence of other…
The classic Trivers-Willard hypothesis suggested the existence of means or conditions able to influence or control the sex of the offspring. Here I propose that mechanisms for the alteration of the gender of the offspring could possibly be…
In multicellular organisms, cells differentiate into several distinct types during early development. Determination of each cellular state, along with the ratio of each cell type, as well as the developmental course during cell…
The new dynamical game theoretic model of sex ratio evolution emphasizes the role of males as passive carriers of sex ratio genes. This shows inconsistency between population genetic models of sex ratio evolution and classical strategic…
Spatial systems with heterogeneities are ubiquitous in nature, from precipitation, temperature and soil gradients controlling vegetation growth to morphogen gradients controlling gene expression in embryos. Such systems, generally described…