Related papers: The expensive son hypothesis
We have analysed the possibility of scaling the sexual Penna ageing model. Assuming that the number of genes expressed before the reproduction age grows linearly with the genome size and that the mutation rate per genome and generation is…
Dormancy is a widespread adaptive strategy that enables populations to persist in fluctuating environments, yet how its benefits depend on the temporal structure of environmental variability remains unclear. We examine how dormancy…
Foraging is constrained by the energy within resources and the mechanics of acquisition and assimilation. Thick molar enamel, a character trait differentiating hominins from African apes, is predicted to mitigate the mechanical costs of…
Demographic transition, characterized by declines in fertility and mortality, is a global phenomenon associated with modernization. While typical patterns of fertility decline are observed in Western countries, their applicability to other…
An imbalance between energy intake and energy expenditure will lead to a change in body weight (mass) and body composition (fat and lean masses). A quantitative understanding of the processes involved, which currently remains lacking, will…
Evolutionary graph theory has grown to be an area of intense study. Despite the amount of interest in the field, it seems to have grown separate from other subfields of population genetics and evolution. In the current work I introduce the…
This article is concerned with a version of the contact process with sexual reproduction on a graph with two levels of interactions modeling metapopulations. The population is spatially distributed into patches and offspring are produced in…
Family history is usually seen as a significant factor insurance companies look at when applying for a life insurance policy. Where it is used, family history of cardiovascular diseases, death by cancer, or family history of high blood…
Because mutations are mostly deleterious, mutation rates should be reduced by natural selection. However, mutations also provide the raw material for adaptation. Therefore, evolutionary theory suggests that the mutation rate must balance…
Understanding the influence of an environment on the evolution of its resident population is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Great progress has been made in homogeneous population structures while heterogeneous structures have…
Parental origin effects play an important role in mammal development and disorder. Case-control mother-child pair genotype data can be used to detect parental origin effects and is often convenient to collect in practice. Most existing…
We study the cost of parallelizing weak-to-strong boosting algorithms for learning, following the recent work of Karbasi and Larsen. Our main results are two-fold: - First, we prove a tight lower bound, showing that even "slight"…
Sex differences in early age mortality have been explained in prior literature by differences in biological make-up and gender discrimination in the allocation of household resources. Studies estimating the effects of these factors have…
Unraveling patterns of animals' movements is important for understanding the fundamental basics of biogeography, tracking range shifts resulting from climate change, predicting and preventing biological invansions. Many researchers have…
We study numerically and analytically a stochastic group selection model in which a population of asexually reproducing individuals, each of which can be either altruist or non-altruist, is subdivided into $M$ reproductively isolated groups…
Despite increasing data from population-wide sequencing studies, the risk for recessive disorders in consanguineous partnerships is still heavily debated. An important aspect that has not sufficiently been investigated theoretically, is the…
Optimal sex allocation theory is one of the most intricately developed areas of evolutionary ecology. Under a range of conditions, particularly under population sub-division, selection favours sex being allocated to offspring non-randomly,…
Families are places of affection and cooperation, but also of conflict. In his famous paper Parent-Offspring Conflict, Robert L. Trivers builds upon W. D. Hamilton's concept of inclusive fitness to argue for genetic conflict in…
Competition among gametes for fertilization imposes strong selection. For external fertilizers, this selective pressure extends to eggs for which spawning conditions can range from sperm limitation (competition among eggs) to sexual…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a death event…