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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…
We present a mathematical simplification for the evolutionary dynamics of a heritable trait within a two-sex population. This trait is assumed to control the timing of sex-specific life-history events, such as the age of sexual maturity and…
We use a two-sex partial differential equation (PDE) model based on the Grandmother Hypothesis. We build on an earlier model by Kim et al. [27] by allowing for evolution in both longevity and age at last birth, and also assuming that…
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…
The provision of intergenerational care, via the Grandmother Hypothesis, has been implicated in the evolution of post-fertile longevity, particularly in humans. However, if grandmothering does provide fitness benefits, a key question is why…
In many cohorts (such as the UK Biobank) on which Mendelian Randomization studies are routinely performed, data on participants' longevity is inadequate as the majority of participants are still living. To nevertheless estimate effects on…
The question as to why most higher organisms reproduce sexually has remained open despite extensive research, and has been called "the queen of problems in evolutionary biology". Theories dating back to Weismann have suggested that the key…
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…
In its initial form, the expensive son hypothesis postulates that sons from male-biased sexually dimorphic species require more food during growth than daughters, which ultimately incur fitness costs for mothers predominantly producing and…
Modifying the Redfield model of sexual reproduction and the Penna model of biological aging, we compare reproduction with and without recombination in age-structured populations. In contrast to Redfield and in agreement with Bernardes we…
Sexual reproduction in Nature requires two sexes, which raises the question why the reproductive scheme did not evolve to have three or more sexes. Here we construct a constrained optimization model based on the communication theory to…
Existing theories for the evolution of aging and death treat senescence as a side-effect of strong selection for fertility. These theories are well-developed mathematically, but fit poorly with emerging experimental data. The data suggest…
There has long been an apparent consensus in the literature on intra-household allocation and fertility that greater paternal involvement in childcare relaxes maternal time constraints, enabling mothers to increase their labor supply or…
We describe the simulation method of modelling the population evolution using Monte Carlo based on the Penna model. Individuals in the populations are represented by their diploid genomes. Genes expressed after the minimum reproduction age…
The analysis of the demographic transition of the past century and a half, using both empirical data and mathematical models, has rendered a wealth of well-established facts, including the dramatic increases in life expectancy. Despite…
We have modified the sexual Penna model by introducing the fluctuating environment and fluctuations representing physiological functions of individuals. Additionally, we have introduced the mother care corresponding to the protection…
The rise in chronic diseases over the last century presents a significant health and economic burden globally. Here we apply evolutionary medicine and life history theory to better understand their development. We highlight an imbalanced…
Insurance and annuity products covering several lives require the modelling of the joint distribution of future lifetimes. In the interest of simplifying calculations, it is common in practice to assume that the future lifetimes among a…
Commonly recognized evolutionarily relevant effects of sexual reproduction include increased diversity, accelerated adaptation, and constrained accumulation of deleterious mutations, along with a secondary effect of species genotype…
Epigenetics is the study of how people's behavior and environments influence the way their genes are expressed, even though their DNA sequence is itself unchanged. By aggregating age-related epigenetic markers, epigenetic 'clocks' have…