Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Evolution
Species comparison of among- and within-individual variation and correlations
Published: 2021-05-20
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Individuals frequently differ consistently from one another in their average behaviors (i.e. “animal personality”) and in correlated suites of consistent behavioral responses (i.e. “behavioral syndromes”). However, understanding the evolutionary basis of this (co)variation has lagged behind demonstrations of its presence. This lag partially stems from comparative methods rarely being used in the [...]
Male age alone predicts paternity success under sperm competition when effects of age and past mating effort are experimentally separated
Published: 2021-05-10
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Older males often perform poorly under post-copulatory sexual selection. It is unclear, however, whether reproductive senescence is due to male age itself or the accumulated costs of the higher lifetime mating effort that is usually associated with male age. To date, very few studies have accounted for male mating history when testing for the effect of male age on sperm traits, and none test how [...]
Evolution of pathogen tolerance and emerging infections: A missing experimental paradigm
Published: 2021-04-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Researchers worldwide are repeatedly warning us against future zoonotic diseases resulting from mankind’s insurgence into natural ecosystems. The same zoonotic pathogens that cause severe infections in a human host fail to produce any disease outcome in their natural hosts. What precise features of the immune system enable natural reservoirs to carry these pathogens so efficiently? To understand [...]
Sex-specific behavioral syndromes allow the independent evolution of behavioral dimorphism
Published: 2021-04-28
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
When selection differs by sex, the capacity for sexes to reach optimal phenotypes can be constrained by the shared genome of males and females. Because phenotypic traits are often correlated, this difference extends across multiple traits and underlying genetic correlations can further constrain evolutionary responses. Behaviors are frequently correlated as behavioral syndromes, and these [...]
Early predation risk shapes adult learning and cognitive flexibility
Published: 2021-03-25
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Predation risk during early ontogeny can impact developmental trajectories and permanently alter adult phenotypes. Such phenotypic plasticity often leads to adaptive changes in traits involved in anti-predator responses. While plastic changes in cognition may increase survival, it remains unclear whether early predation experience shapes cognitive investment and drives developmental plasticity in [...]
Evolvability and the Fossil Record
Published: 2021-03-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
The concept of evolvability—the capacity of a population to produce and maintain evolutionarily relevant variation—has become increasingly prominent in evolutionary biology. Although paleontology has a long history of investigating questions of evolvability, often invoking different but allied terminology, the study of evolvability in the fossil record has seemed intrinsically problematic. How [...]
Human social organization during the Late Pleistocene: Beyond the nomadic-egalitarian model
Published: 2021-03-14
Subjects: Anthropology, Archaeological Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biological Psychology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Many researchers assume that until 10-12,000 years ago, humans lived in small, mobile, relatively egalitarian bands composed mostly of kin. This “nomadic-egalitarian model” informs evolutionary explanations of behavior and our understanding of how contemporary societies differ from those of our evolutionary past. Here, we synthesize research challenging this model and propose an alternative, the [...]
Modeling complex biological systems: Tackling the parameter curse through evolution
Published: 2021-02-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Systems Biology
In this perspective paper we review a previously published evolutionary model of the lac-operon to argue and demonstrate the importance of using evolutionary methods to derive relevant parameters. We show that by doing so we can debug experimental and modeling artifacts.
Perspective: The evolutionary dangers of high COVID case counts
Published: 2021-02-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Virology
The recent simultaneous appearance of numerous highly contagious variants of SARS-CoV-2 demonstrate that the rate of adaptive evolution in the SARS-CoV-2 population is accelerating. It is no longer appropriate to focus only on epidemiological goals like flattening the curve and vaccinating to achieve herd immunity. We are now in a new phase of the pandemic, in which we must also focus on the [...]
The origin of life: Oligomerization of RNA nucleotides on prebiotic Earth
Published: 2021-02-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
We propose a plausible oligomerization process of RNA nucleotides on prebiotic Earth. The process takes place at tideland and estuary where wet & dry cycle and pH fluctuation occur due to tide. The process proceeds with help of clay minerals that catalyze not only oligomerization but also cross complementary self-replication of RNA oligomers by lowering the activation energy of covalent [...]
Evolution of sexual development and sexual dimorphism in insects
Published: 2021-02-23
Subjects: Cell and Developmental Biology, Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Most animal species consist of two distinct sexes. At the morphological, physiological, and behavioural levels the differences between males and females are numerous and dramatic, yet at the genomic level they are often slight or absent. This disconnect is overcome because simple genetic differences or environmental signals are able to direct the sex-specific expression of a shared genome. A [...]
CEUTA snowy plover open access data - COMMENTARY
Published: 2021-02-12
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Eberhart-Phillips et al. (2020, Scientific Data 7: 149) recently published a data-paper CeutaOPEN. However, the publication has significant shortcomings: the article does not explain the history nor the context of the project, it did not give credit to the developers of field methodology and data structure, and fails to acknowledge key contributions to the project. We request correcting these [...]
Phylogenomic approaches to detecting and characterizing introgression
Published: 2021-02-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Phylogenomics has revealed the remarkable frequency with which introgression occurs across the tree of life. These discoveries have been enabled by the rapid growth of methods designed to detect and characterize introgression from whole-genome sequencing data. A large class of phylogenomic methods makes use of data from one sample per species to infer introgression based on expectations from the [...]
Male size and reproductive performance in three species of livebearing fishes (Gambusia spp.): a systematic review and meta-analysis
Published: 2021-02-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
1. The genus Gambusia represents approximately 45 species of polyandrous livebearing fishes with reversed sexual size dimorphism (i.e. males smaller than females) and with copulation predominantly via male coercion. Male body size has been suggested as an important sexually selected trait, but despite abundant research, evidence for sexual selection on male body size in this genus is mixed. 2. [...]
Set theory and types of groups in phylogenetics
Published: 2021-01-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Mathematically, it is possible to be a subset (⊂) of a set and not to be its member (∈)—e.g. the empty set. Here, I highlight that a similar principle applies to undiscovered objects in sets of real objects. The current definitions of holophyly (monophyly sensu stricto) and paraphyly suggest a direct membership (∈) of ancestors in taxa. These ancestors are almost always unknown (undiscovered) in [...]