Related papers: The expensive son hypothesis
How someone allocates their time is important to their health and well-being. In this paper, we show how evolutionary algorithms can be used to promote health and well-being by optimizing time usage. Based on data from a large…
The puzzle associated with the cost of sex, an old problem of evolutionary biology, is discussed here from the point of view of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. The results suggest, in a simplified model, that the prevalence of sexual…
We study the dynamics of an age-structured population in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of its parent. When advantageous mutation is favored, the average fitness of the population grows…
The evolution of preferences that account for other agents' fitness, or other-regarding preferences, has been modeled with the "indirect approach" to evolutionary game theory. Under the indirect evolutionary approach, agents make decisions…
Evolutionary theory predicts that children fare better if they resemble their father. However, if a man is promiscuous then his children tend to be (unwittingly) raised within other families; such children should fare better if they do not…
Evolutionary deep intelligence synthesizes highly efficient deep neural networks architectures over successive generations. Inspired by the nature versus nurture debate, we propose a study to examine the role of external factors on the…
Maternal investment directly shapes early developmental conditions and therefore has longterm fitness consequences for the offspring. In oviparous species prenatal maternal investment is fixed at the time of laying. To ensure the best…
Although maturation delays are frequently included in population models, researchers rarely account for mortality between birth and maturity. Previous discrete population models have included mortality of immature individuals during the…
Males are often the "sicker" sex with male biased parasitism found in a taxonomically diverse range of species. There is considerable interest in the processes that could underlie the evolution of sex-biased parasitism. Mating system…
Mammalian offspring require parental care, at least in the form of suckling during their early development. While mothers need to invest considerable time and energy in ensuring the survival of their current offspring, they also need to…
Many studies have analyzed how variability in reproductive success affects fitness. However, each study tends to focus on a particular problem, leaving unclear the overall structure of variability in populations. This fractured conceptual…
Extensive post reproductive lifespan (PRLS) is observed only in a few species, such as humans or resident killer whales, and its origin is under debate. Hypotheses like mother-care and grandmother-care invoke strategies of…
In species reproducing both sexually and asexually clones are often more common in recently established populations. Earlier studies have suggested that this pattern arises from natural selection favouring asexual recruitment in young…
Predicting evolution of expanding populations is critical to control biological threats such as invasive species and cancer metastasis. Expansion is primarily driven by reproduction and dispersal, but nature abounds with examples of…
How fast does a population evolve from one fitness peak to another? We study the dynamics of evolving, asexually reproducing populations in which a certain number of mutations jointly confer a fitness advantage. We consider the time until a…
Adaptation is a central topic in theoretical biology, of practical importance for analyzing drug resistance mutations. Several authors have used arguments based on extreme value theory in their work on adaptation. There are complications…
How self-incompatibility systems are maintained in plant populations is still a debated issue. Theoretical models predict that self-incompatibility systems break down according to the intensity of inbreeding depression and number of…
Background: Speciation corresponds to the progressive establishment of reproductive barriers between groups of individuals derived from an ancestral stock. Since Darwin did not believe that reproductive barriers could be selected for, he…
We consider a recent innovative theory by Chastain et al. on the role of sex in evolution [PNAS'14]. In short, the theory suggests that the evolutionary process of gene recombination implements the celebrated multiplicative weights updates…
The new dynamical game theoretic model of sex ratio evolution emphasizes the role of males as passive carriers of sex ratio genes. This shows inconsistency between population genetic models of sex ratio evolution and classical strategic…