Maternal Effects in Molecular Evolution

Maternal effects in molecular evolution.

We introduce a model of molecular evolution in which the fitness of an individual depends both on its own and on the parent's genotype. The model can be solved by means of a nonlinear mapping onto the standard quasispecies model. The dependency on the parental genotypes cancels from the mean fitness, but not from the individual sequence concentrations. For finite populations, the position of th...

The Role of Maternal Effects in Evolution

Molecular phylogenetics and evolution of maternal care in Membracine treehoppers.

The treehopper subfamily Membracinae (Insecta: Hemiptera: Membracidae) comprises the majority of genera and species diversity in the New World tropics. These treehoppers exhibit a wide range of social behaviors, making them an excellent group for studying patterns of social evolution in insects. However, to date the tribal and generic relationships have remained unclear. We reconstructed the ph...

Evolution of maternal effects: past and present.

1. A BRIEF HISTORYOF ‘MATERNAL EFFECTSAS ADAPTATIONS’, 1998 It has been said that many original ideas reflect a convergence of related thought that coalesces into a unified representation of what many have been thinking. This is certainly true for the subfield of maternal effects evolution. The study of maternal effects has a long history. The first two papers reported in the ISI database deali...

The Evolution of Multivariate Maternal Effects

There is a growing interest in predicting the social and ecological contexts that favor the evolution of maternal effects. Most predictions focus, however, on maternal effects that affect only a single character, whereas the evolution of maternal effects is poorly understood in the presence of suites of interacting traits. To overcome this, we simulate the evolution of multivariate maternal eff...