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Epigenetic aberrations have profound effects on phenotypic output. Genome wide methylation alterations are inheritable to pass down the aberrations through multiple generations. We developed a statistical method, Genome-wide Identification…
Evidence from animal models and epidemiological studies has linked prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) to a broad range of long-term cognitive and behavioral deficits. However, there is virtually no information in the scientific literature…
Growth in brain volume is one of the most spectacular changes in the hominid lineage. The anthropological community agrees on that point. No consensus, however, has been reached on selection pressures contributing to that growth. In that…
Machine learning has been successfully used in critical domains, such as medicine. However, extracting meaningful insights from biomedical data is often constrained by the lack of their available disease labels. In this research, we…
This paper is not (or at least not only) about human infant mortality. In line with reliability theory, "infant" will refer here to the time interval following birth during which the mortality (or failure) rate decreases. This definition…
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…
Paternal age at conception has been found to predict the number of new genetic mutations. We examined the effect of father's age at birth on offspring intelligence, head circumference and personality traits. Using the Minnesota Twin Family…
We study the long-term health and human capital impacts of local economic conditions experienced during the first 1,000 days of life. We combine historical data on monthly unemployment rates in urban England and Wales 1952-1967 with data…
We examine the dynamics of an age-structured population model in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of the parent. While the total population of the system always reaches a steady state, the…
In the context of the global obesity epidemic, it is important to know who becomes obese and why. However, the processes that determine the changing shape of Body Mass Index (BMI) distributions in high-income societies are not…
Simultaneously evolving morphologies (bodies) and controllers (brains) of robots can cause a mismatch between the inherited body and brain in the offspring. To mitigate this problem, the addition of an infant learning period by the…
Fetal oxygen delivery and consumption and blood gases in relation to gestational age. Oxygen crosses the placenta by diffusion and placental permeability to O$_2$ is high. Thus, the fetus receives adequate amounts, but vascular Po$_2$ is…
The long-term growth rate of populations in varying environments quantifies the evolutionary value of processing the information that biological individuals inherit from their ancestors and acquire from their environment. Previous models…
Is there an advantage to heterogeneity in a population where individuals grow and divide by fission? This is a broad question, to which there is no easy universal answer. This article aims to provide a quantitative answer in the specific…
Since laws of physics exist in nature, their possible relationship to terrestial growth is introduced. By considering the human body as a dynamic system of variable mass (and volume), growing under a gravity field, it is shown how natural…
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…
After birth setting up an effective immune system is a major challenge for all living organisms. In this paper we show that this process can be explored by using the age-specific infant death rate as a kind of sensor. This is made possible…
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…
We design a stochastic individual-based model structured in energy, for single species consuming an external resource, where populations are characterized by a typical energy at birth in $\mathbb{R}^{*}_{+}$. The resource is maintained at a…
This study probes the effects of Japan's traditional alphabetical surname-based call system on students' experiences and long-term behavior. It reveals that early listed surnames enhance cognitive and non-cognitive skill development. The…