Related papers: Evolution, Heritable Risk, and Skewness Loving
Risk aversion is a common behavior universal to humans and animals alike. Economists have traditionally defined risk preferences by the curvature of the utility function. Psychologists and behavioral economists also make use of concepts…
We examine the evolutionary basis for risk aversion with respect to aggregate risk. We study populations in which agents face choices between alternatives with different levels of aggregate risk. We show that the choices that maximize the…
In classical evolutionary theory, genetic variation provides the source of heritable phenotypic variation on which natural selection acts. Against this classical view, several theories have emphasized that developmental variability and…
We are living in an uncertain and dynamically changing world, where optimal decision-making under uncertainty is directly linked to the survival of species. However, evolutionary selection pressures that shape value-based decision-making…
Selection shapes all kinds of behaviors, including how we make decisions under uncertainty. The risk attitude reflected from it should be simple, flexible, yet consistent. In this paper we engaged evolutionary dynamics to find the decision…
For many traits, including susceptibility to common diseases in humans, causal loci uncovered by genetic mapping studies explain only a minority of the heritable contribution to trait variation. Multiple explanations for this "missing…
Social networks exhibit strikingly systematic patterns across a wide range of human contexts. While genetic variation accounts for a significant portion of the variation in many complex social behaviors, the heritability of egocentric…
The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…
Many life-history traits, like the age at maturity or adult longevity, are important determinants of the generation time. For instance, semelparous species whose adults reproduce once and die have shorter generation times than iteroparous…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
The behaviour of individuals is a main actor in the control of the spread of a communicable disease and, in turn, the spread of an infectious disease can trigger behavioural changes in a population. Here, we study the emergence of the…
Commonly recognized evolutionarily relevant effects of sexual reproduction include increased diversity, accelerated adaptation, and constrained accumulation of deleterious mutations, along with a secondary effect of species genotype…
Sexual selection theory models evolution of sexual signals and preferences using simple life histories. However, life-history models predict that males benefit from increasing sexual investment approaching old age, producing age-dependent…
Several studies question the adaptive value of female preferences for older males. Theory and evidence show that older males carry more deleterious mutations in their sperm than younger males carry. These mutations are not visible to…
Same-sex sexual behavior is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, but its adaptive origins remain a prominent puzzle. Here I suggest the possibility that same-sex sexual behavior arises as a consequence of the competition between an…
Robustness to genetic or environmental disturbances is often considered as a key property of living systems. Yet, in spite of being discussed since the 1950s, how robustness emerges from the complexity of genetic architectures and how it…
The tendency of repeating past choices more often than expected from the history of outcomes has been repeatedly empirically observed in reinforcement learning experiments. It can be explained by at least two computational processes:…
There is little doubt in scientific circles that--counting from the origin of life towards today--evolution has led to an increase in the amount of information stored within the genomes of the biosphere. This trend of increasing information…
Strategies aimed at reducing the negative effects of long-term uncertainty and risk are common in biology, game theory, and finance, even if they entail a cost in terms of mean benefit. Here, we focus on the single mutant's invasion of a…