Related papers: Is Female Health Cyclical? Evolutionary Perspectiv…
Here we show that herd immunity is not a measure we can implement, trust, control or depend on, and that waiting for herd immunity to play a role is tantamount to hope for the best. Herd immunity is not some protection, as it has been…
It has been a puzzling question why some organisms reproduce sexually. Fisher and Muller hypothesized that reproducing by sex can speed up the evolution. They explained that in the sexual reproduction, recombination can combine beneficial…
The vast majority of multi-cellular organisms are anisogamous, meaning that male and female sex cells differ in size. It remains an open question how this asymmetric state evolved, presumably from the symmetric isogamous state where all…
Women's basal body temperature (BBT) follows a periodic pattern that is associated with the events in their menstrual cycle. Although daily BBT time series contain potentially useful information for estimating the underlying menstrual phase…
It has recently been suggested that the fundamental haploid-diploid cycle of eukaryotic sex exploits a rudimentary form of the Baldwin effect. Thereafter the other associated phenomena can be explained as evolution tuning the amount and…
In many social mammals, early life social adversity and social integration largely predict individual health, lifespan and reproductive success. Efforts in identifying the physiological mechanisms mediating the relationship between the…
Does bearing children shorten a woman's life expectancy? Several demographic studies, historic and current, have found no such effect. But the Caerphilly cohort study is far the most prominent and frequently-cited, and it answers in the…
The process of evolution by natural selection leads to phenotypes of increasing fitness. For cellular chemical reaction networks, this means optimising a variety of fitness functions such as robustness, precision, or sensitivity to external…
Recent studies show that the microbial communities inhabiting the human intestine can have profound impact on our well-being and health. However, we have limited understanding of the mechanisms that control this complex ecosystem. Based on…
Mobile health (mHealth) apps such as menstrual trackers provide a rich source of self-tracked health observations that can be leveraged for health-relevant research. However, such data streams have questionable reliability since they hinge…
A full accounting of biological robustness remains elusive; both in terms of the mechanisms by which robustness is achieved and the forces that have caused robustness to grow over evolutionary time. Although its importance to topics such as…
Sexual reproduction in Nature requires two sexes, which raises the question why the reproductive scheme did not evolve to have three or more sexes. Here we construct a constrained optimization model based on the communication theory to…
Maintenance of sexual reproduction and genetic recombination imposes physiological costs when compared to parthenogenic reproduction, most prominently: for maintaining the corresponding (molecular) machinery, for finding a mating partner,…
Traditional epidemic models consider that individual processes occur at constant rates. That is, an infected individual has a constant probability per unit time of recovering from infection after contagion. This assumption certainly fails…
The origin of the unusual incubation period distribution in the development of AIDS is largely unresolved. A key factor in understanding the observed distribution of latency periods, as well as the occurrence of infected individuals not…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
The evolutionary biology of aging is fundamental to understanding the mechanisms of aging and how to develop anti-aging treatments. Thus far most evolutionary theory concerns the genetics of aging with limited physiological integration.…
This paper suggests that the fundamental haploid-diploid cycle of eukaryotic sex exploits a rudimentary form of the Baldwin effect. With this explanation for the basic cycle, the other associated phenomena can be explained as evolution…
Self-regulatory models are common in nature, as described e.g. in (\cite{mur}), (\cite{ha}) and (\cite{Gb}).\\ Let us consider a system made up of a number of glands as a motivation. Each gland secretes a hormone that allows secretion in…
Certain periodical cicadas exhibit life cycles with durations of 13 or 17 years, and it is now generally accepted that such large prime numbers arise evolutionarily to avoid synchrony with predators. Less well explored is the question of…