AbstractThere can be genetic conflict between genome elements differing in transmission patterns, and thus in evolutionary interests. We show here that the concept of genetic conflict provides new insight into local adaptation and phenotypic plasticity. Local adaptation to heterogeneous habitats sometimes occurs as tightly linked clusters of genes with among-habitat polymorphism, referred to as genomic islands of divergence, and our work sheds light on their evolution. Phenotypic plasticity can also influence the divergence between ecotypes, through developmental responses to habitat-specificcues. We show that clustered genes coding for ecological specialism and unlinked generalist genes coding for phenotypic plasticity differ in their evolutionary interest. This is an ecological genetic conflict, operating between habitat specialism and phenotypically plastic generalism. The phenomenon occurs both for single traits and for syndromes of co-adapted traits. Using individual-based simulations and numerical analysis, we investigate how among-habitat genetic polymorphism and phenotypic plasticity depend on genetic architecture. We show that for plasticity genes that are unlinked to a genomic island of divergence, the slope of a reaction norm will be steeper in comparison with the slope favored by plasticity genes that are tightly linked to genes for local adaptation.

AbstractMaternal effects can provide offspring with reliable information about the environment they are likely to experience, but also offer scope for maternal manipulation of young when interests diverge between parents and offspring. To predict the impact and outcome of parent-offspring conflict, we model the evolution of maternal effects on local adaptation of young. We find that parent-offspring conflict strongly influences the stability of maternal effects; moreover, the nature of the disagreement between parents and young predicts how conflict is resolved: when mothers favour less extreme mixtures of phenotypes relative to offspring (i.e. when mothers stand to gain by hedging their bets), mothers win the conflict by providing offspring with only limited amounts of information. When offspring favour overproduction of one and the same phenotype across all environments compared to mothers (e.g. when offspring favour a larger body size), neither side wins the conflict and signaling breaks down. Only when offspring favour less extreme mixtures relative to their mothers (the case we consider least likely), offspring win the conflict and obtain full information about the state of the environment. We conclude that a partial or complete breakdown of informative maternal effects will be the norm rather than the exception in the presence of parent-offspring conflict.

AbstractNumerous studies have shown that social adversity in early life can have long-lasting negative consequences for social behaviour in adulthood, consequences that may in turn be propagated to future generations. Given these intergenerational effects, it is puzzling why natural selection might favour such sensitivity to an individual’s early social environment. To address this question, we model the evolution of social sensitivity in the development of in helping behaviours, showing that natural selection indeed favours individuals whose tendency to help others is dependent on early-life social experience. We find that natural selection typically favours positive social feedbacks, in which individuals who received more help in early life are also more likely to help others in adulthood, while individuals who received no early-life help develop low tendencies to helping others later in life. This positive social sensitivity is favoured because of an intergenerational relatedness feedback: patches with many helpers tend to be more productive, leading to higher relatedness within the local group, which in turn favours higher levels of help in the next generation.

AbstractMost predictions on the evolution of adaptive parental effects and phenotypic memory exclusively focus on the role of the abiotic environment. How parental effects are affected by population demography and life history is less well understood. To overcome this, we use an analytical model to assess whether selection acting on fecundity versus viability affects the evolution of parental effects in a viscous population experiencing a spatiotemporally varying environment. We find that parental effects commonly evolve in regimes of viability selection, but are less likely to evolve in regimes of fecundity selection. In regimes of viability selection, an individual’s phenotype becomes correlated with its local environment during its lifetime, as those individuals with a locally adapted phenotype are more likely to survive until parenthood. Hence, a parental phenotype rapidly becomes an informative cue about its local environment, favoring the evolution of parental effects. By contrast, in regimes of fecundity selection, locally maladapted and adapted parents survive at equal rates, so that the parental phenotype, by itself, is not informative about the local environment. Correlations between phenotype and environment still arise, but only when more fecund, locally adapted individuals leave more successfully established offspring to the local patch. Hence, correlations take at least two generations to develop, making them more sensitive to distortion by environmental change or competition with immigrant offspring. Hence, we conclude that viability selection is most conducive to the evolution of adaptive parental effects in spatially structured populations.

Variation in stress responses has been investigated in relation to environmental factors, species ecology, life history and fitness. Moreover, mechanistic studies have unravelled molecular mechanisms of how acute and chronic stress responses cause physiological impacts (‘damage’), and how this damage can be repaired. However, it is not yet understood how the fitness effects of damage and repair influence stress response evolution. Here we study the evolution of hormone levels as a function of stressor occurrence, damage and the efficiency of repair. We hypothesise that the evolution of stress responses depends on the fitness consequences of damage and the ability to repair that damage. To obtain some general insights, we model a simplified scenario in which an organism repeatedly encounters a stressor with a certain frequency and predictability (temporal autocorrelation). The organism can defend itself by mounting a stress response (elevated hormone level), but this causes damage that takes time to repair. We identify optimal strategies in this scenario and then investigate how those strategies respond to acute and chronic exposures to the stressor. We find that for higher repair rates, baseline and peak hormone levels are higher. This typically means that the organism experiences higher levels of damage, which it can afford because that damage is repaired more quickly, but for very high repair rates the damage does not build up. With increasing predictability of the stressor, stress responses are sustained for longer, because the animal expects the stressor to persist, and thus damage builds up. This can result in very high (and potentially fatal) levels of damage when organisms are exposed to chronic stressors to which they are not evolutionarily adapted. Overall, our results highlight that at least three factors need to be considered jointly to advance our understanding of how stress physiology has evolved: (i) temporal dynamics of stressor occurrence; (ii) relative mortality risk imposed by the stressor itself versus damage caused by the stress response; and (iii) the efficiency of repair mechanisms.

Cultural evolution theory has long been inspired by evolutionary biology. Conceptual analogies between biological and cultural evolution have led to the adoption of a range of formal theoretical approaches from population dynamics and genetics. However, this has resulted in a research programme with a strong focus on cultural transmission. Here, we contrast biological with cultural evolution, and highlight aspects of cultural evolution that have not received sufficient attention previously. We outline possible implications for evolutionary dynamics and argue that not taking them into account will limit our understanding of cultural systems. We propose 12 key questions for future research, among which are calls to improve our understanding of the combinatorial properties of cultural innovation, and the role of development and life history in cultural dynamics. Finally, we discuss how this vibrant research field can make progress by embracing its multidisciplinary nature.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Foundations of cultural evolution’.

There is a growing interest in predicting the social and ecological contexts that favor the evolution of maternal effects. Most predictions focus, however, on maternal effects that affect only a single character, whereas the evolution of maternal effects is poorly understood in the presence of suites of interacting traits. To overcome this, we simulate the evolution of multivariate maternal effects (captured by the matrix M) in a fluctuating environment. We find that the rate of environmental fluctuations has a substantial effect on the properties of M: in slowly changing environments, offspring are selected to have a multivariate phenotype roughly similar to the maternal phenotype, so that M is characterized by positive dominant eigenvalues; by contrast, rapidly changing environments favor Ms with dominant eigenvalues that are negative, as offspring favor a phenotype which substantially differs from the maternal phenotype. Moreover, when fluctuating selection on one maternal character is temporally delayed relative to selection on other traits, we find a striking pattern of cross-trait maternal effects in which maternal characters influence not only the same character in offspring, but also other offspring characters. Additionally, when selection on one character contains more stochastic noise relative to selection on other traits, large cross-trait maternal effects evolve from those maternal traits that experience the smallest amounts of noise. The presence of these cross-trait maternal effects shows that individual maternal effects cannot be studied in isolation, and that their study in a multivariate context may provide important insights about the nature of past selection. Our results call for more studies that measure multivariate maternal effects in wild populations.

Mathematical models have played an important role in the development of sexual selection theory. These models come in different flavors and they differ in their assumptions, often in a subtle way. Similar questions can be addressed by modeling frameworks from population genetics, quantitative genetics, evolutionary game theory, or adaptive dynamics, or by individual-based simulations. Confronted with such diversity, nonspecialists may have difficulties judging the scope and limitations of the various approaches. Here we review the major modeling frameworks, highlighting their pros and cons when applied to different research questions. We also discuss recent developments, where classical models are enriched by including more detail regarding genetics, behavior, demography, and population dynamics. It turns out that some seemingly well-established conclusions of sexual selection theory are less general than previously thought. Linking sexual selection to other processes such as sex-ratio evolution or speciation also reveals that enriching the theory can lead to surprising new insights.

Intralocus sexual conflict (IASC) occurs when a trait under selection in one sex constrains the other sex from achieving its sex-specific fitness optimum. Selection pressures on body size often differ between the sexes across many species, including humans: among men individuals of average height enjoy the highest reproductive success, while shorter women have the highest reproductive success. Given its high heritability, IASC over human height is likely. Using data from sibling pairs from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, we present evidence for IASC over height: in shorter sibling pairs (relatively) more reproductive success (number of children) was obtained through the sister than through the brother of the sibling pair. By contrast, in average height sibling pairs most reproductive success was obtained through the brother relative to the sister. In conclusion, we show that IASC over a heritable, sexually dimorphic physical trait (human height) affects Darwinian fitness in a contemporary human population.

It is often argued that females with attractive partners should produce more sons because these sons will inherit their father's attractiveness. Numerous field and laboratory studies have addressed this hypothesis, with inconsistent results, but there is surprisingly little theoretical work on the topic. Here, we present an extensive investigation of the link between male attractiveness and offspring sex ratios, using evolutionary, individual-based computer simulations. In situations where sexual selection leads to the stable exaggeration of a costly male trait and a costly female preference, we find that females with attractive partners produce more sons than females with unattractive partners. This same qualitative pattern is seen for a wide range of different models, with discrete or continuous variation in the male trait, under Fisherian or good-genes sexual selection and for abrupt or gradual sex ratio adjustment. However, in all simulations, it takes a huge number of generations to evolve, suggesting that selection acting on sex ratio adjustment is weak. Our models ignore many potential costs and constraints associated with manipulation, which implies that selection may be weaker still in natural populations. These results may explain why published evidence for sex ratio bias in relation to male attractiveness is mixed. © the Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. All rights reserved.