23 papers · ranked by Valyu relevance
Zeki Doruk Erden
Sexual selection is among the most pervasive and costly features of biological reproduction, reaching its greatest elaboration in lineages of greater complexity and capability—costs that signal a structural function not adequately accounted for by only the existing explanations focused on immediate adaptive benefits. I…
Jørgen S. Søraker, Yimen G. Araya-Ajoy, Ella F. Cole, Ben C. Sheldon
Natural selection drives adaptive evolution and underpins eco-evolutionary processes. However, the causes of variation of selection (strength and direction), and its spatio-temporally scaling, remain poorly understood. Most selection estimates are population-wide, ignoring the variation in fine-scale selection regimes…
Débora Y. C. Brandt, Aida M. Andrés, Tim Connallon, Max Reuter
Balancing selection refers to a suite of scenarios in which natural selection maintains genetic polymorphisms affecting fitness and its components. Empirical studies have documented a variety of specific cases of balancing selection, yet the general prevalence of balanced polymorphisms within genomes remains a topic of…
Robin Heinen, Madhav Prakash Thakur, Jeffrey Alan Harvey, Rieta Gols
Climate change, through its vast impacts on biodiversity, is one of the most-studied drivers of ecological change. Although reports of detrimental impacts of gradual global warming on the behavior and physiology of individuals, as well as on populations and communities are now common in scientific literature, much less…
Csenge Petak, Lapo Frati, Renske M. A. Vroomans, Melissa H. Pespeni + 1 more
Title: Significance The speed and direction of evolution depend on the availability of phenotypic variation. Genotype-to-phenotype maps can, over time, bias phenotypic variability to more readily produce alternative adaptive phenotypes in fluctuating environments. However, because properties of the fitness landscapes…
Joan Roughgarden
Darwin’s [The Descent of Man (2nd Edn.) (1871)] theory of sexual selection has been expanded into a system of interlocking hypotheses to explain many features of sexual reproduction. It focusses on mating success and relies on processes featuring bad genes, selfishness, competition, conflict, coercion, ownership and…
Mauricio González-Forero
Mathematically integrating genetics, development, and evolution is a longstanding challenge. Here I develop general mathematical theory that integrates sexual, discrete, multilocus genetics, development, and evolution. This yields an exact method to describe the evolutionary dynamics of allele frequencies and linkage…
Jay J. Falk, Michael S. Webster, Dustin R. Rubenstein
Phenotypic polymorphisms have fascinated evolutionary biologists since the field's inception, providing easily observable and quantifiable variation amenable to both empirical and theoretical study. However, identifying the selective mechanisms by which these polymorphisms are maintained can be challenging, in part…
Luke Piszkin, Dervis Can Vural
In this work, we integrate theoretical modeling, molecular simulation, and empirical analysis to identify and characterize evolutionary hysteresis. We first show how epistatic interactions create bistable fitness landscapes and structural hysteresis in a two-locus Wright–Fisher model, revealing two distinct hysteresis…
Authors not listed
Designing molecules with specific target properties remains a fundamental challenge in computational chemistry. While existing approaches show promise, most rely on simplified representations like SMILES strings or 2D graphs that lack essential three-dimensional geometric information. We present EvoDiffMol, a…
Hasan Ahmed, Deena Goodgold, Khushali Kothari, Rustom Antia
Cumulants and moments are closely related to the basic mathematics of continuous and discrete selection (respectively). These relationships generalize Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection and also make clear some of its limitation. The relationship between cumulants and continuous selection is especially…
Marcela Vargas-Hernandez, Perla Valeria Munguia-Fragozo, Samantha de Jesus Rivero-Montejo, Diana Maria Amaya-Cruz + 4 more
Title: Simple Summary It is necessary to contextualize hormesis within an evolutionary framework that incorporates the advances developed from Neo-Darwinism to contemporary evolutionary biology. The central problem addressed in this review is the lack of a conceptual integration between hormesis and evolutionary…
Kristen M. Martinet, Brea Dace, Luke J. Harmon, Shaelyn Pearson + 4 more
The outcome of evolution sometimes appears to be predictable, as in the evolution of the same characteristics independently in convergent evolution. Other times, evolution’s path depends on starting conditions or chance events, and some forms evolve just once and never appear again. Is convergence, and by implication…
Momoko Amemiya, Ayaka Sakata
Gene regulatory network (GRN) models are widely used to investigate gene-expression dynamics in biological systems. evolutionary GRN model proposed by Kaneko (2007), which investigated the relationship between robustness to nongenetic phenotypic noise and robustness to mutation. We explicitly reconstruct the simulation…
Liudmyla Vasylenko, Adi Livnat
At the fundamental conceptual level, two alternatives have traditionally been considered for how mutations arise and how evolution happens: 1) random mutation and natural selection, and 2) Lamarckism. Recently, the theory of Interaction-based Evolution (IBE) has been proposed, according to which mutations are neither…
Domenico Caudo, Mattia Miotto, Giancarlo Ruocco, Greta Grassmann
Polyploidy is defined as the existence of more than two complete sets of homologous chromosomes. Despite it being a widespread phenomenon across the tree of life, its role as either an evolutionary innovation or a dead end is still debated. Here, we investigate how under varying selective pressures the degree of ploidy…
Quentin Fernandez de Grado, Antoine Frénoy
Mutation is the ultimate mechanism that produces genetic novelty, and thus a central ingredient of evolution. Mutation rates are therefore thought to be tuned by natural selection, for example to optimize a delicate balance between the generation of adaptive diversity and the accumulation of deleterious mutations. As…
Authors not listed
RNA droplets assembled from co-transcriptionally folded nanostructures have recently emerged as a promising platform for constructing protocells and minimal synthetic cell models. In these systems, a custom-designed DNA template encodes an RNA nanostar, which is produced by transcription and self-assembles into…
Hossein Sabzian
Agricultural crops are a type of cultural trait and the way farmers of US counties select them can itself result in county-level cultural traits. Using real-world data from 1997 to 2022, we have developed a systematic framework to study the selective mechanisms behind these traits. Our findings indicate that…
Tetsuhiro S. Hatakeyama
Phenotypic plasticity and genetic assimilation play key roles in adaptive evolution, yet their underlying mechanism has lacked a unified physical description. A major theoretical difficulty lies in the fundamental difference in timescales, as phenotypic plasticity occurs rapidly within a generation whereas genetic…
Arsham Nejad Kourki
Recent years have seen growing interest in applying the Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality (ETI) framework to human sociocultural evolution. Proponents argue that human societies exhibit features - such as multilevel organization, cooperation, and division of labour - sufficiently analogous to biological ETIs to…
Authors not listed
Machine olfaction—the artificial replication of the sense of smell—faces significant challenges due to the absence of large, standardized training datasets. Unlike vision, language, and audio models, which benefit from extensive corpora such as ImageNet, GLUE, and AudioSet, olfaction lacks scaled equivalents and…
Authors not listed
Molecular mechanisms governing initiation steps of the assembly of thousands of endogenous multi-protein complexes (EMCs) remain incompletely understood. Here, multiple lines of observations are reported reflecting the biological functions-aligned initiation sequence of hybrid assembly pathways (HAPs) of EMCs. HAPs…