Human cooperation in large groups and between non-kin individuals remains a Darwinian puzzle. Investigations into whether and how sexual selection is involved in the evolution of cooperation represent a new and important research direction. Here, 69 groups of four men or four women recruited from a rural population in Senegal played a sequential public-good game in the presence of out-group observers, either of the same sex or of the opposite sex. At the end of the game, participants could donate part of their gain to the village school in the presence of the same observers. Both contributions to the public good and donations to the school, which reflect different components of cooperativeness, were influenced by the sex of the observers. The results suggest that in this non-Western population, sexual selection acts mainly on men's cooperative behaviour with non-kin, whereas women's cooperativeness is mainly influenced by nonsexual social selection.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
---|---|
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3440379 | PMC |
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0044403 | PLOS |
Evolution
January 2025
Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, 560012, India.
Under current climate change patterns, rapidly changing environments can impose strong selection on traits. Costly traits that require heavy investment and strongly affect fitness may be particularly vulnerable to such changes. Despite organisms experiencing dynamic environments, our knowledge of costly trait response is limited as longitudinal studies across generations are rare.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurr Opin Insect Sci
January 2025
Department of Genetics and Developmental Biology, The Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and Research Institute, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 3109601, Israel. Electronic address:
Reproductive organs are among the most variable and rapidly evolving structures in the animal kingdom, probably due to sexual selection. In insects, the diverse morphology of male genitalia is often one of the few visible characteristics that can reliably distinguish closely related species, making it crucial for taxonomic classification. Consistent with this, males of the model organism Drosophila melanogaster and its closely related species display remarkable variations in genital morphology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAppl Environ Microbiol
January 2025
CAS Key Laboratory of Tropical Marine Bio-resources and Ecology, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Applied Marine Biology, South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, China.
Sexual reproduction and recruitment enhance the genetic diversity and evolution of reef-building corals for population recovery and coral reef conservation under climate change. However, new recruits are vulnerable to physical changes and the mechanisms of symbiosis establishment remain poorly understood. Here, , a broadcast spawning hermaphrodite reef-building coral, was subjected to settlement and juvenile growth in flow-through seawater at 27.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEvolution
January 2025
Department of Biological Sciences, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15282, United States.
Male reproductive proteins frequently evolve rapidly in animals, potentially due to adaptive evolution driven by sperm competition, polyspermy avoidance, or pathogen defense. Alternatively, elevated rates of protein change may be due to relaxed constraint. The prostate-specific protease KLK3 has experienced dynamic evolution since its origin stemming from a gene duplication in the ancestor of all Old World primates, with instances of rapid evolution, stasis, and pseudogenization.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Hist Behav Sci
January 2025
Department of Social Research Methodology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
This paper analyzes medical-sexological and sexual-psychological public discourse in Hungary between the Second World War and the regime change, through counseling and science communication books. It engages with works on the history of Hungarian socialist sexual discourse. It differs from such works in two main respects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!