On the role of males

Synergy from reproductive division of labor and genetic complexity drive the evolution of sex

Computer experiments that mirror the evolutionary dynamics of sexual and asexual organisms as they occur in nature were used to test features proposed to explain the evolution of sexual recombination. Results show that this evolution is better described as a network of interactions between possible sexual forms, including diploidy, thelytoky, facultative sex, assortation, bisexuality, and division of labor between the sexes, rather than a simple transition from parthenogenesis to sexual recombination. Diploidy was shown to be fundamental for the evolution of sex; bisexual reproduction emerged only among anisogamic diploids with a synergistic division of reproductive labor; and facultative sex was more likely to evolve among haploids practicing assortative mating. Looking at the evolution of sex as a complex system through individual-based simulations explains better the diversity of sexual strategies known to exist in nature, compared to classical analytical models.

Women's fertility across the cycle increases the short-term attractiveness of creative intelligence

Male provisioning ability may have evolved as a "good dad" indicator through sexual selection, whereas male creativity may have evolved partly as a "good genes" indicator. If so, women near peak fertility (midcycle) should prefer creativity over wealth, especially in short-term mating. Forty-one normally cycling women read vignettes describing creative but poor men vs. uncreative but rich men. Women's estimated fertility predicted their short-term (but not long-term) preference for creativity over wealth, in both their desirability ratings of individual men (r=.40, p<.01) and their forced-choice decisions between men (r=.46, p<.01). These preliminary results are consistent with the view that creativity evolved at least partly as a good genes indicator through mate choice.

Dominance as adaptive stressing and ranking of males, serving to allocate reproduction by differential self-suppressed fertility: towards a fully biological understanding of social systems

Dominance is a biological concept of an asymmetric 'power' relationship between (any pair of) individuals, as a result of previous encounters with others biasing likelihood of contesting. That this requires dedicated neural structure shows that dominance is adaptive; and it is usually thought that fitness is increased through dominance (hierarchy) minimising mutually unproductive contest over resources, and/or determining access to or control over resources. But highly inconsistent data indicates that this operational definition is too wide, and given clear evidence that dominance is invariably same-sex, it would seem instead to function primarily to allocate reproduction. Dominance contest exposes individual differences in metabolic vigor especially, but also in various other, including sophisticated attributes; and by a self-organising process there is ranking of same-sex individuals in a hierarchy. But this achieves nothing in itself without an integral mechanism of corresponding individual variable self-suppression of the physiology re reproduction--and mate choice with rank as the criteria. Reproductive suppression would appear to vary along a continuum, from in some species (most 'cooperative breeders') a 100% reproductive skew with total suppression of all individuals bar the sole breeder to, in most others, a gradient down the length of the dominance hierarchy. The mechanism in most species is directly either hormonal or pheromonal, on top of an indirect consequence of the stress caused by relatively low rank. Dominance would seem to have evolved as a major instrument of the proposed 'genetic filter' function of the male, whereby in effect accumulated deleterious genetic material is 'quarantined' in the male half of the lineage from where it is purged, so as to keep this source of reproductive logjam away from females, thereby to avoid amplifying the problem of the female being necessarily the limiting factor in reproduction. The theory makes predictions mutually exclusive of the consensus model, that dominance/DH is: same-sex only; present whenever, within one or both sexes, there is potential conflict over reproduction, and there is no mechanism to preclude this, but otherwise is absent; always associated with some degree of differential physiological reproductive suppression. This new conceptualization of dominance has major implications for the social as well as biological sciences, in that resource-competition models of the basis of sociality will have to give way to a thoroughgoing biological understanding that places centre-stage not resources but reproduction; with consequent radical revision of notions of 'power'.

Could maternal testosterone levels govern mammalian sex ratio deviations?

Although maternal dominance and good condition are frequently associated with raised offspring sex ratios in mammals, the key factor may be female testosterone, which not only underpins the behavioural indicators but could also provide a pathway to a possible proximate mechanism for sex determination. By taking into account the fact that female testosterone levels rise in response to environmental stressors, it is possible to re-interpret the findings of atypical sex ratios in mammals in a way that reconciles seemingly conflicting results and reveals instead what could be a coherent, adaptive system of sex allocation in mammals.

Inbreeding depression of female fecundity by genetic factors retained in natural populations of a male-haploid social mite (Acari: Tetranychidae)

We previously determined that certain recessive genes decrease female fecundity in a haplo-diploid spider mite, Stigmaeopsis miscanthi (Saito). However, whether the depression was caused by the breakdown of heterosis or the expression of deleterious genes retained in a population could not be determined, because we had started our inbreeding experiment from a mixture of two isolated populations. In order to answer this basic question, inbreeding effects on survival and fecundity were measured for eight small populations occurring far from the two initial populations. There was little depression of immature survival of inbred lineages in all populations. On the other hand, in two inbred lineages, both originating from the smallest populations, female oviposition decreased significantly with the increase of Wrights f-value, showing that mildly deleterious genes are actually retained even in natural populations of haplo-diploid organisms.

Sexual selection and the maintenance of sex

Sex is expensive. A population of females that reproduce asexually should prima facie have twice the growth rate of an otherwise equivalent anisogamous sexual population lacking paternal care, or a population with modes of paternal care that can be co-opted by parthenogenetic females. The two leading theories for the maintenance of sex require either synergistic interactions between deleterious mutations, or antagonistic epistasis between beneficial mutations. Current evidence is equivocal as to whether the required levels of epistasis exist. Here I show that a third factor, differential male mating success (or, more generally, higher variance in male than in female fitness), can drastically reduce mutational load in sexual populations with or without any form of epistasis. Differential mating success has the further advantage of being ubiquitous, and is likely to have preceded or evolved concurrently with anisogamy.