Related papers: The expensive son hypothesis
Identifying the factors that influence labor force participation could elucidate how individuals arrive at their labor supply decisions, whose understanding is, in turn, of crucial importance in analyzing how the supply side of the labor…
Background: Overweight and obesity are an increasing phenomenon worldwide. Predicting future overweight or obesity early in the childhood reliably could enable a successful intervention by experts. While a lot of research has been done…
It was shown by Gillespie (1974) that if two genotypes produce the same average number of offspring on but have a different variance associated within each generation, the genotype with a lower variance will have a higher effective fitness.…
Motivated by the wide range of known self-replicating systems, some far from genetics, we study a system composed by individuals having an internal dynamics with many possible states that are partially stable, with varying mutation rates.…
Darwin's theory of evolution emphasized that positive selection of functional proficiency provides the fitness that ultimately determines the structure of life, a view that has dominated biochemical thinking of enzymes as perfectly…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
Beneficial reversals of dominance reduce the costs of genetic trade-offs and can enable selection to maintain genetic variation for fitness. Beneficial dominance reversals are characterized by the beneficial allele for a given context (e.g.…
One of the most challenging issues of evolutionary biology concerns speciation, the emergence of new species from an initial one. The huge amount of species found in nature demands a simple and robust mechanism. Yet, no consensus has been…
Studies by microbiologists from the 1970s provided robust estimates for the energy supply and demand of a prokaryotic cell. The amount of ATP needed to support growth was calculated from the chemical composition of the cell and known…
We find that the hypothesis made by Jan, Stauffer and Moseley [Theory in Biosc., 119, 166 (2000)] for the evolution of sex, namely a strategy devised to escape extinction due to too many deleterious mutations, is sufficient but not…
Accurate fetal birth weight prediction is a cornerstone of prenatal care, yet traditional methods often rely on imaging technologies that remain inaccessible in resource-limited settings. This study presents a novel machine learning-based…
We consider age-structured models with an imposed refractory period between births. These models can be used to formulate alternative population control strategies to China's one-child policy. By allowing any number of births, but with an…
There are two contrasting explanations of sleep: as a proximate, essential physiological function or as an adaptive state of inactivity and these hypotheses remain widely debated. To investigate the adaptive significance of sleep, we…
Information is increasingly being viewed as a resource used by organisms to increase their fitness. Indeed, it has been formally shown that there is a sensible way to assign a reproductive value to information and it is non-negative.…
We investigate two stochastic models of a growing population subject to selection and mutation. In our models each individual carries a fitness which determines its mean offspring number. Many of these offspring inherit their parent's…
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…
Biological competition is widely believed to result in the evolution of selfish preferences. The related concept of the `homo economicus' is at the core of mainstream economics. However, there is also experimental and empirical evidence for…
Competition between individuals drives the evolution of whole species. Although the fittest individuals survive the longest and produce the most offspring, in some circumstances the resulting species may not be optimally fit. Here, using…
This paper investigates the mechanisms underlying scientific stratification in the era of transition from elite to mass science. Existing scholarship has largely examined scientific stratification through the Matthew effect framework at the…
We consider a population organised hierarchically with respect to size in such a way that the growth rate of each individual depends only on the presence of larger individuals. As a concrete example one might think of a forest, in which the…