Related papers: The human behavioural immune system is a product o…
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…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…
Human behavior is a dynamic process that evolves with experience. Understanding the evolution of individual's risk propensity is critical to design public health interventions to propitiate the adoption of better biosecurity protocols and…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Extensive cooperation among biologically unrelated individuals is uniquely human and much current research attempts to explain this fact. We draw upon social, cultural, and psychological aspects of human uniqueness to present an integrated…
Biological evolution of a population is governed by the fitness landscape, which is a map from genotype to fitness. However, a fitness landscape depends on the organisms environment, and evolution in changing environments is still poorly…
Popular hypotheses about the origins of collective adaptation are related to two basic behaviours: protection from predators and a combined search for food resources. Among the anti-predator explanations, the predator confusion hypothesis…
Our understanding of risk preferences can be sharpened by considering their evolutionary basis. The existing literature has focused on two sources of risk: idiosyncratic risk and aggregate risk. We introduce a new source of risk, heritable…
Risk-driven behavior provides a feedback mechanism through which individuals both shape and are collectively affected by an epidemic. We introduce a general and flexible compartmental model to study the effect of heterogeneity in the…
Infectious disease transmission in human populations has a complex two-way interaction with changes in host behaviour. It is increasingly recognised that incorporating adaptive behavioural change into epidemic models is important for…
Antibiotic resistance is a growing public health problem. To gain a fundamental understanding of resistance evolution, a combination of systematic experimental and theoretical approaches is required. Evolution experiments combined with…
As pathogens spread in a population of hosts, immunity is built up and the pool of susceptible individuals is depleted. This generates selective pressure, to which many human RNA viruses, such as influenza virus or SARS-CoV-2, respond with…
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…
Normal anxiety is considered an adaptive response to the possible presence of danger, but is susceptible to dysregulation. Anxiety disorders are prevalent at high frequency in contemporary human societies, yet impose substantial disability…
Humans interact with each other on a daily basis by developing and maintaining various social norms and it is critical to form a deeper understanding of how such norms develop, how they change, and how fast they change. In this work, we…
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…
Building ethical machines may involve bestowing upon them the emotional capacity to self-evaluate and repent on their actions. While apologies represent potential strategic interactions, the explicit evolution of guilt as a behavioural…
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…
We investigate a model for a mosquito-borne epidemic in which human hosts may adopt protective behaviour against vector bites in response to information on both past and current disease prevalence. Assuming that mosquitoes can also feed on…
Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as…