Related papers: The expensive son hypothesis
We consider a hierarchically structured population in which the amount of resources an individual has access to is affected by individuals that are larger, and that the intake of resources by an individual only affects directly the growth…
Mitochondrial and nuclear genomes must be co-adapted to ensure proper cellular respiration and energy production. Mito-nuclear incompatibility reduces individual fitness and induces hybrid infertility, suggesting a possible role in…
Heritability is a central concept in the long-standing debate about nature versus nurture in biological and social sciences. However, existing notions of heritability are based on strong assumptions and do not use explicit causal models. We…
Recently, several researchers have found that cost-based satisficing search with A* often runs into problems. Although some "work arounds" have been proposed to ameliorate the problem, there has been little concerted effort to pinpoint its…
Great apes, the other living members of our hominid family, become decrepit before the age of forty and rarely outlive their fertile years. In contrast, women - even in high mortality hunter-gatherer populations - usually remain healthy and…
When predicting the fate and consequences of recurring deleterious mutations in self-fertilising populations most models developed make the assumption that populations have discrete non-overlapping generations. This makes them biologically…
Mixed dispersal syndromes have historically been regarded as bet-hedging mechanisms that enhance survival in unpredictable environments, ensuring that some propagules stay in the maternal environment while others can potentially colonize…
Using a lattice model based on Monte Carlo simulations, we study the role of the reproduction pattern on the fate of an evolving population. Each individual is under the selection pressure from the environment and random mutations. The…
Animals live in groups to defend against predation and to obtain food. However, for some animals --- especially ones that spend long periods of time feeding --- there are costs if a group chooses to move on before their nutritional needs…
One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…
Fitness consequence of dispersal depends on property of the entire landscape, which patches are available and what are the cost of moving. These are information that are not available locally when an organism make the decision to disperse.…
We consider a model of asexually reproducing individuals. The birth and death rates of the individuals are affected by a fitness parameter. The rate of mutations that cause the fitnesses to change is proportional to the population size, N.…
Stronger selection implies faster evolution---that is, the greater the force, the faster the change. This apparently self-evident proposition, however, is derived under the assumption that genetic variation within a population is primarily…
Using CPS data for 1976 to 2022 we explore how wage inequality has evolved for married couples with both spouses working full time full year, and its impact on household income inequality. We also investigate how marriage sorting patterns…
Plant domestication involved a process of selection through human agency of a series of traits collectively termed the domestication syndrome. Current debate concerns the pace at which domesticated plants emerged from cultivated wild…
The X chromosome is present as a single copy in the heterogametic sex, and this hemizygosity is expected to drive unusual patterns of evolution on the X relative to the autosomes. For example, the hemizgosity of the X may lead to a lower…
This position paper argues that the Baldwin effect is widely misunderstood by the evolutionary computation community. The misunderstandings appear to fall into two general categories. Firstly, it is commonly believed that the Baldwin effect…
Mechanisms leading to speciation are a major focus in evolutionary biology. In this paper, we present and study a stochastic model of population where individuals, with type a or A, are equivalent from ecological, demographical and spatial…
We follow up on a companion work that considered growth rates of populations growing at different sites, with different randomly varying growth rates at each site, in the limit as migration between sites goes to 0. We extend this work here…
We derive sharp bounds on the non consumption utility component in an extended Roy model of sector selection. We interpret this non consumption utility component as a compensating wage differential. The bounds are derived under the…