Evolution: Bioluminescent Courtship as an Engine of Diversity

Evolution: Bioluminescent Courtship as an Engine of Diversity

A new study finds that the evolution of bioluminescent sexual displays drives high species richness across animal lineages, providing a crucial link between microevolutionary and macroevolutionary explanations of biodiversity.

Parasitic exploitation as an engine of diversity.

Parasitic exploitation occurs within and between a wide variety of taxa in a plethora of diverse contexts. Theoretical and empirical analyses indicate that parasitic exploitation can generate substantial genetic and phenotypic polymorphism within species. Under some circumstances, parasitic exploitation may also be an important factor causing reproductive isolation and promoting speciation. Her...

Evolution as a Computational Engine

Given a nite set K of lethal genes, a starting genome x and a desired target genome y, is there a sequence of base insertions, deletions, and substitutions , which from x produces the desired genome y, and such that no intermediate genome contains a lethal gene. The main result of this paper is that, appropriately formulated, this problem is undecidable, even when the underlying alphabet has on...

The Evolution of Duck Courtship

Love, Lust, Courtship and Affection as Evolution in Digital Play

This paper outlines two models for framing affection games as a contribution to the evolution of courtship rituals or as a matriculation through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It then frames the design of these games through two distinct lenses. The first is a game verb based framing, focusing on the affectionate actions designed to meet game goals. The second is an interaction dynamic framing, w...