Related papers: The expensive son hypothesis
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. Reproduction depends on the payoff a strategy receives. The payoff depends on the environment that may change over time, on intrinsic uncertainties, and on other sources of…
In this working paper, I developed a suite of macroeconomic models that shed light on the intricate relationship between economic development, health, and fertility. These innovative models conceptualize health as an intermediate good,…
Consider a branching process with a homogeneous reproduction law. Sampling a single cell uniformly from the population at a time $T > 0$ and looking along the sampled cell's ancestral lineage, we find that the reproduction law is…
The parent-offspring conflict theory is an interesting premise for understanding the dynamics of parental care. However, this theory is not easy to test empirically, as exact measures of parental investment in an experimental set-up are…
In evolutionary algorithms, the fitness of a population increases with time by mutating and recombining individuals and by a biased selection of more fit individuals. The right selection pressure is critical in ensuring sufficient…
Sex chromosomes have evolved repeatedly across the Tree of Life, yet their evolutionary fates differ strikingly. In sharp contrast to mammals and birds with degenerated, stable Y/W chromosomes, in most amphibians, teleosts, non avian…
Historical trends suggest the decline in importance of land as a production factor but its continued importance as a store of value. Using an overlapping generations model with land and aggregate uncertainty, we theoretically study the…
The problem of unicellular-multicellular transition is one of the main issues that is discussing in evolutionary biology. In [1] the fitness of a colony of cells is considered in terms of its two basic components, viability and fecundity.…
Kin selection theory is a kind of causal analysis. The initial form of kin selection ascribed cause to costs, benefits, and genetic relatedness. The theory then slowly developed a deeper and more sophisticated approach to partitioning the…
We are living in an uncertain and dynamically changing world, where optimal decision-making under uncertainty is directly linked to the survival of species. However, evolutionary selection pressures that shape value-based decision-making…
We model a social-encounter network where linked nodes match for reproduction in a manner depending probabilistically on each node`s attractiveness. The developed model reveals that increasing either the network`s mean degree or the…
Predicting the adaptation of populations to a changing environment is crucial to assess the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Many theoretical studies have tackled this issue by modeling the evolution of quantitative traits…
The lunar cycle has long been suspected to influence biological phenomena. Folklore alludes to such a relationship, but previous scientific analyses have failed to find significant associations. It has been shown that lunar cycles indeed…
We consider the dynamics imposed by natural selection on the populations of two competing, sexually reproducing, haploid species. In this setting, the fitness of any genome varies over time due to the changing population mix of the…
We characterize the outcomes of a canonical deterministic model for the intergenerational transmission of capital that features differential fertility. A fertility function determines the relationship between parental capital and the number…
We study age-structured branching models with reproduction law depending on the remaining lifetime of the parent. The lifespan of an individual is decided at its birth and its remaining lifetime decreases at the unit speed. The models…
Most of the mammal species hold polygynous mating systems. The majority of the marriage systems of mankind were also polygynous over civilized history, however, socially imposed monogamy gradually prevails throughout the world. This is…
We present, solve and numerically simulate a simple model that describes the consequences of increased longevity on fertility rates, population growth and the distribution of wealth in developed societies. We look at the consequences of the…
A series of studies have revealed the among-population components of genetic variation are higher for the paternal Y chromosome than for the maternal mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which indicates sex-biased migrations in human populations.…
Traditionally, machine learning algorithms rely on the assumption that all features of a given dataset are available for free. However, there are many concerns such as monetary data collection costs, patient discomfort in medical…