Related papers: Nature-nurture interplay in educational attainment
The model of interaction between learning and evolutionary optimization is designed and investigated. The evolving population of modeled organisms is considered. The mechanism of the genetic assimilation of the acquired features during a…
The provision of intergenerational care, via the Grandmother Hypothesis, has been implicated in the evolution of post-fertile longevity, particularly in humans. However, if grandmothering does provide fitness benefits, a key question is why…
Biological evolution can be conceptualized as a search process in the space of gene sequences guided by the fitness landscape, a mapping that assigns a measure of reproductive value to each genotype. Here we discuss probabilistic models of…
How does the climatic experience of previous generations affect today's attention to environmental questions? Using self-reported beliefs and environmental themes in folklore, we show empirically that the realized intensity of deviations…
Opportunities, such as access to education or family background, shape income inequality by influencing the chances of economic success. Unequal opportunities create uncertainty about whether success is merit- or luck-based. We examine how…
Understanding the influence of an environment on the evolution of its resident population is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Great progress has been made in homogeneous population structures while heterogeneous structures have…
A key goal in studies of ecology and evolution is understanding the causes of phenotypic diversity in nature. Most traits of interest, such as those relating to morphology, life-history, immunity and behaviour are quantitative, and…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…
The mutual relationship between evolution and learning is a controversial argument among the artificial intelligence and neuro-evolution communities. After more than three decades, there is still no common agreement on the matter. In this…
The Tangled Nature Model of biological and cultural evolution features interacting agents which compete for limited resources and reproduce in an error prone fashion and at a rate depending on the `tangle' of interactions they maintain with…
Epigenetics is the study of how people's behavior and environments influence the way their genes are expressed, even though their DNA sequence is itself unchanged. By aggregating age-related epigenetic markers, epigenetic 'clocks' have…
This perspective posits that gene-environment interplay (GxE) studies should be developed both theoretically and empirically to be of relevance to policy makers. On the theoretical front, this development is essential because the current…
The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…
Although the origin of the fat-tail characteristic of the degree distribution in complex networks has been extensively researched, the underlying cause of the degree distribution characteristic across the complete range of degrees remains…
Spatial environmental variation can either amplify or suppress the fixation of beneficial mutants in structured populations, yet the interplay of ecological factors and spatial structure in determining which outcome occurs remains…
Genome-wide association studies, in which as many as a million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) are measured on several thousand samples, are quickly becoming a common type of study for identifying genetic factors associated with many…
Heterozygote disadvantage is potentially a potent driver of population genetic divergence. Also referred to as underdominance, this phenomena describes a situation where a genetic heterozygote has a lower overall fitness than either…
The persistence of biodiversity of species is a challenging proposition in ecological communities in the face of Darwinian selection. The present article investigates beyond the pairwise competitive interactions and provides a novel…
In a geographically distributed population, assortative clustering plays an important role in evolution by modifying local environments. To examine its effects in a linear habitat, we consider a one-dimensional grid of cells, where each…
Cognizance of gene-environment interactions may help prevent or detain the onset of complex diseases like cardiovascular disease, cancer, type2 diabetes, autism or asthma by adjustments to lifestyle. In this regard, we extend the Bayesian…