Parent-offspring conflict is predicted to occur because offspring will demand more parental investment than is optimal for the parent, and is said to be strongest during weaning when parents reduce nursing while offspring continue to demand parental care. While weaning conflict has been shown to be stressful in offspring, little is known about the effects of weaning conflict on mothers. We hypo...

Low birth weight (LBW) and hypoxia are among the environmental factors most reliably associated with schizophrenia; however, the nature of this relationship is unclear and both gene-environment interaction and gene-environment covariation models have been proposed as explanations. High-risk (HR) designs that explore whether obstetric complications differentially predict outcomes in offspring at...

BACKGROUND Antenatal depression and childhood maltreatment have each been associated with offspring psychopathology, but have never been examined in the same sample. AIMS To determine whether childhood maltreatment influences the association between antenatal depression and offspring psychopathology. METHOD Prospectively collected data on antenatal depression, offspring maltreatment (age 11...

The existence of adaptive phenotypic plasticity demands that we study the evolution of reaction norms, rather than just the evolution of fixed traits. This approach requires the examination of functional relationships among traits not only in a single environment but across environments and between traits and plasticity itself. In this study, I examined the interplay of plasticity and local ada...

In previous studies by our group, we found that female offspring of parental divorce and parental remarriage are more susceptible to suicide attempt than male offspring. In this study, we examine whether these findings remain even after controlling for offspring depression. The sample consists of respondents from the 2001-2002 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. Mul...

Maternal effects are increasingly recognized as important drivers of population dynamics and determinants of evolutionary trajectories. Recently, there has been a proliferation of studies finding or citing a positive relationship between maternal size/age and offspring size or offspring quality. The relationship between maternal phenotype and offspring size is intriguing in that it is unclear w...

We present a model for the distribution of family names that explains the power-law decay of the probability distribution for the number of people with a given family name. The model includes a description of the process of generation or importation of new names, and a description of the growth of the number of individuals with a name, and corresponds for a long-enduring culture to a Galton–Wat...

This paper presents first results from a project to reconstitute the demographic behavior of three villages in Württemberg (southern Germany) from the mid-sixteenth to the early twentieth century. Using high-quality registers of births, deaths, and marriages, and unusual ancillary sources, we improve on the family-reconstitution techniques pioneered by Louis Henry and applied to good effect by ...

Background Psychological distress in women during the postpartum period has been for a while an issue of great concern. There is substantial evidence that maternal psychological distress after pregnancy is associated with an adverse cognitive and behavioural consequence in the offspring [1]. There are also severe implications during the perinatal period for the mother’s long term mental health ...

Invasive species commonly predate the offspring of native species and eggs are the life stage most vulnerable to this predation. In many species with no maternal care, females can alter the phenotype of eggs to protect them, for instance through chemical defense. In ladybirds egg alkaloids deter predators, including invasive predatory species of ladybirds, but conversely may attract cannibals w...