Average levels of nucleotide diversity are ten-fold lower in humans than in the fruitfly, Drosophila melanogaster. Despite this difference, apparently as a result of a lower population size, patterns of genomic diversity are strikingly similar in being correlated with local rates of recombination, and influenced by similar interactions between positive natural selection and recombination. Both ...

Longevity is a life-history trait that is shaped by natural selection. An unexplored consequence is how selection on this trait affects diversity and diversification in species assemblages. Motivated by the diverse rockfish (Sebastes) assemblage in the North Pacific, the effects of trade-offs in longevity against competitive ability are explored. A competition model is developed and used to exp...

Reciprocity and repeated games have been at the center of attention when studying the evolution of human cooperation. Direct reciprocity is considered to be a powerful mechanism for the evolution of cooperation, and it is generally assumed that it can lead to high levels of cooperation. Here we explore an open-ended, infinite strategy space, where every strategy that can be encoded by a finite ...

For 8 years I have been pursuing in print an ambitious and at times highly technical programme of work, the 'Formal Darwinism Project', whose essence is to underpin and formalize the fitness optimization ideas used by behavioural ecologists, using a new kind of argument linking the mathematics of motion and the mathematics of optimization. The value of the project is to give stronger support to...

In the traditional approach to evolutionary game theory, the individuals of a population meet each other at random, and they have no control over the frequency or duration of interactions. Here we remove these simplifying assumptions. We introduce a new model, where individuals differ in the rate at which they seek new interactions. Once a link between two individuals has formed, the productivi...

The analysis of differences between loci in the variance of gene frequency over populations within a species has been suggested as a method of detecting natural selection. It is shown that, in the absence of selection, the expected variation over loci depends strongly on the pattern of relationships between populations. The effect of structure within a species is always to increase the variatio...

The origin of life is believed to have progressed through an RNA world, in which RNA acted as both genetic material and functional molecules. The structure of the evolutionary fitness landscape of RNA would determine natural selection for the first functional sequences. Fitness landscapes are the subject of much speculation, but their structure is essentially unknown. Here we describe a compreh...

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