Related papers: The expensive son hypothesis
This paper shows that the mid-20th century was characterised by a considerable reduction in breastfeeding rates, reducing from over 80% in the late 1930s to just over 40% only three decades later. We investigate how maternal breastfeeding…
This paper studies the mutation-selection balance in three simplified replication models. The first model considers a population of organisms replicating via the production of asexual spores. The second model considers a sexually…
The rise in chronic diseases over the last century presents a significant health and economic burden globally. Here we apply evolutionary medicine and life history theory to better understand their development. We highlight an imbalanced…
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 prevalence of sexual reproduction ("sex") in eukaryotes is an enigma of evolutionary biology. Sex increases genetic variation only tells its long-term superiority in essence. The accumulation of harmful mutations causes an immediate and…
The very insightful Trivers-Willard hypothesis, proposed in the early 1970s, states that females in good physiological conditions are more likely to produce male offspring, when the variance of reproductive success amongst males is high. A…
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 study the effect of stochastic feeding costs on animal-based commodities with particular focus on aquaculture. More specifically, we use soybean futures to infer on the stochastic behaviour of salmon feed, which we assume to follow a…
The ratio of males to females in a population is a meaningful characteristic of sexual species. The reason for this biological property to be available to the observers of nature seems to be a question never asked. Introducing the notion of…
Gynandromorphs are creatures where at least two different body sections are a different sex. Bilateral gynandromorphs are half male and half female. Here we develop a theory of gynandromorph ontogeny based on developmental control networks.…
The researchers have drawn much attention about the birth weight of newborn babies in the last three decades. The birth weight is one of the vital roles in the babys health. So many researchers such as (2),(1) and (4) analyzed the birth…
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…
We propose a causal analysis of the mother's educational level on the health status of the newborn, in terms of gestational weeks and weight. The analysis is based on a finite mixture structural equation model, the parameters of which have…
At any moment in time, evolution is faced with a formidable challenge: refining the already highly optimised design of biological species, a feat accomplished through all preceding generations. In such a scenario, the impact of random…
As artificial intelligence systems (AIs) become increasingly produced by recursive self-improvement, a form of evolution may emerge, with the traits of AI systems shaped by the success of earlier AIs in designing and propagating their…
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…
This report presents a statistical analysis of the impact of key maternal characteristics, including age, smoking status, parity, height, weight, and gestation period, on newborn birth weight. A realworld dataset comprising 1,236…
In this paper, we extend the demographic eco-evolutionary game approach, based on explicit birth and death dynamics instead of abstract "fitness" interpreted as an abstract "Malthusian parameter", by the introduction of the delay resulting…
We examine the dynamics of an age-structured population model in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of the parent. While the total population of the system always reaches a steady state, the…
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.…