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The bizarre elaboration of sexually selected traits such as the peacock's tail was a puzzle to Charles Darwin and his 19th century followers. Ronald A. Fisher crafted an ingenious solution in the 1930s, positing that female preferences would become genetically correlated with preferred traits due to nonrandom mating. These genetic correlations would translate selection for preferred traits into selection...
A fundamental aim of post‐genomic 21st century biology is to understand the genotype–phenotype map (GPM) or how specific genetic variation relates to specific phenotypic variation. Quantitative genetics approximates such maps using linear models, and has developed methods to predict the response to selection in a population. The other major field of research concerned with the GPM, developmental evolutionary...
Why do females of socially monogamous species engage in extra‐pair copulations? This long‐standing question remains a puzzle, because the benefits of female promiscuous behavior often do not seem to outweigh the costs. Genetic constraint models offer an answer by proposing that female promiscuity emerges through selection favoring alleles that are either beneficial for male reproductive success (intersexual...
Primate limb morphology is often described as either generalized, that is, suited to a range of locomotor and positional behaviors, or specialized for unique locomotor behaviors such as brachiation or bipedalism. The evolution of highly specialized limb morphology may result in loss of evolvability, that is, in a decreased capacity of the locomotor skeleton to evolve in response to selection towards...
Male genitalia are among the most phenotypically diverse morphological traits, and sexual selection is widely accepted as being responsible for their evolutionary divergence. Studies of house mice suggest that the shape of the baculum (penis bone) affects male reproductive fitness and experimentally imposed postmating sexual selection has been shown to drive divergence in baculum shape across generations...
Evolution should render individuals resistant to stress and particularly to stress experienced by ancestors. However, many studies report negative effects of stress experienced by one generation on the performance of subsequent generations. To assess the strength of such transgenerational effects we propose a strategy aimed at overcoming the problem of type I errors when testing multiple proxies of...
In the context of social evolution, the ecological drivers of selection are the phenotypes of other individuals. The social environment can thus evolve, potentially changing the adaptive value for different social strategies. Different branches of evolutionary biology have traditionally focused on different aspects of these feedbacks. Here, we synthesize behavioral ecology theory concerning evolutionarily...
Understanding how environmental variation affects phenotypic evolution requires models based on ecologically realistic assumptions that include variation in population size and specific mechanisms by which environmental fluctuations affect selection. Here we generalize quantitative genetic theory for environmentally induced stochastic selection to include general forms of frequency‐ and density‐dependent...
Within‐population variation in the traits underpinning reproductive output has long been of central interest to biologists. Since they are strongly linked to lifetime reproductive success, these traits are expected to be subject to strong selection and, if heritable, to evolve. Despite the formation of durable pair bonds in many animal taxa, reproductive traits are often regarded as female‐specific,...
The additive genetic variation (VA) of fitness in a population is of particular importance to quantify its adaptive potential and predict its response to rapid environmental change. Recent statistical advances in quantitative genetics and the use of new molecular tools have fostered great interest in estimating fitness VA in wild populations. However, the value of VA for fitness in predicting evolutionary...
When divergent populations form hybrids, hybrid fitness can vary with genome composition, current environmental conditions, and the divergence history of the populations. We develop analytical predictions for hybrid fitness, which incorporate all three factors. The predictions are based on Fisher's geometric model, and apply to a wide range of population genetic parameter regimes and divergence conditions,...
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