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Ongoing ambitions are to understand the evolution of costly polyandry and its consequences for species ecology and evolution. Emerging patterns could stem from feed‐back dynamics between the evolving mating system and its genetic environment, defined by interactions among kin including inbreeding. However, such feed‐backs are rarely considered in nonselfing systems. We use a genetically explicit model...
Populations can persist in directionally changing environments by evolving. Quantitative genetic theory aims to predict critical rates of environmental change beyond which populations go extinct. Here, we point out that all current predictions effectively assume the same specific fitness function. This function causes selection on the standing genetic variance of quantitative traits to become increasingly...
Ontogenetic allometry, how species change with size through their lives, and heterochony, a decoupling between shape, size, and age, are major contributors to biological diversity. However, macroevolutionary allometric and heterochronic trends remain poorly understood because previous studies have focused on small groups of closely related species. Here, we focus on testing hypotheses about the evolution...
The origins of evolutionary radiations are often traced to the colonization of novel adaptive zones, including unoccupied habitats or unutilized resources. For herbivorous insects, the predominant mechanism of diversification is typically assumed to be a shift onto a novel lineage of host plants. However, other drivers of diversification are important in shaping evolutionary history, especially for...
The evolution of female preference for male genetic quality remains a controversial topic in sexual selection research. One well‐known problem, known as the lek paradox, lies in understanding how variation in genetic quality is maintained in spite of natural selection and sexual selection against low‐quality alleles. Here, we theoretically investigate a scenario where females pay a direct fitness...
Microbial pathogens and viruses can often maintain sufficient population diversity to evade a wide range of host immune responses. However, when populations experience bottlenecks, as occurs frequently during initiation of new infections, pathogens require specialized mechanisms to regenerate diversity. We address the evolution of such mechanisms, known as stochastic phenotype switches, which are...
Williams' evolutionary theory of senescence based on antagonistic pleiotropy has become a landmark in evolutionary biology, and more recently in biogerontology and evolutionary medicine. In his original article, Williams launched a set of nine “testable deductions” from his theory. Although some of these predictions have been repeatedly discussed, most have been overlooked and no systematic evaluation...
The vertebrate brain shows an extremely conserved layout across taxa. Still, the relative sizes of separate brain regions vary markedly between species. One interesting pattern is that larger brains seem associated with increased relative sizes only of certain brain regions, for instance telencephalon and cerebellum. Till now, the evolutionary association between separate brain regions and overall...
Biodiversity arises from the balance between speciation and extinction. Fossils record the origins and disappearance of organisms, and the branching patterns of molecular phylogenies allow estimation of speciation and extinction rates, but the patterns of diversification are frequently incongruent between these two data sources. I tested two hypotheses about the diversification of primates based on...
With shifts in island area, isolation, and cycles of island fusion–fission, the role of Quaternary sea‐level oscillations as drivers of diversification is complex and not well understood. Here, we conduct parallel comparisons of population and species divergence between two island areas of equivalent size that have been affected differently by sea‐level oscillations, with the aim to understand the...
Although all genetic variation ultimately stems from mutations, their properties are difficult to study directly. Here, we used multiple mutation accumulation (MA) lines derived from five genetic backgrounds of the green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii that have been previously subjected to whole genome sequencing to investigate the relationship between the number of spontaneous mutations and change...
Gene duplication is an important evolutionary process thought to facilitate the evolution of phenotypic diversity. We investigated if gene duplication was associated with the evolution of phenotypic differences in a highly social insect, the honeybee Apis mellifera. We hypothesized that the genetic redundancy provided by gene duplication could promote the evolution of social and sexual phenotypes...
Here, I provide the first direct estimate of the spontaneous mutation rate in an Old World monkey, using a seven individual, three‐generation pedigree of African green monkeys. Eight de novo mutations were identified within ∼1.5 Gbp of accessible genome, corresponding to an estimated point mutation rate of 0.94 × 10−8 per site per generation, suggesting an effective population size of ∼12000 for the...
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