Evolutionary theory articles within Nature Communications

Featured

  • Article
    | Open Access

    As spiteful behaviors harm both the actor and the target, it is challenging to understand how these behaviors could be adaptive. Here Fulker et al. show that spite can be favored by feedbacks with network structure that create correlated and anti-correlated behavioral interactions simultaneously.

    • Zachary Fulker
    • , Patrick Forber
    •  & Christoph Riedl
  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Classic debates concerning the extent to which scientists can predict evolution have gained new urgency as environmental changes force species to adapt or risk extinction. We highlight how our ability to predict evolution can be constrained by data limitations that cause poor understanding of deterministic natural selection. We then emphasize how such data limits can be reduced with feasible empirical effort involving a combination of approaches.

    • Patrik Nosil
    • , Samuel M. Flaxman
    •  & Zachariah Gompert
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Game theory has contributed much to the understanding of social evolution. In an elegant combination of experimental tests and modelling, this study suggests that when bacteria face intense competition, repeated retaliation outcompetes a single tit-for-tat response to attack.

    • William P. J. Smith
    • , Maj Brodmann
    •  & Kevin R. Foster
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Most evolutionary game theory focuses on isolated games. Here, Donahue et al. present a general framework for ‘multichannel games’ in which individuals engage in a set of parallel games with a partner, and show that such parallel interactions favor the evolution of reciprocity across games.

    • Kate Donahue
    • , Oliver P. Hauser
    •  & Christian Hilbe
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Multicellularity is one of the major transitions in evolution. Here, authors use a model to show that compared to unicellular bacteria, multicellular fungi can more rapidly colonise immobile, nutrient poor resources because exoenzymes provide greater or longer lasting benefits to mycelial organisms.

    • Luke L. M. Heaton
    • , Nick S. Jones
    •  & Mark D. Fricker
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Models of the origin of life generally require a mechanism to structure emerging populations. Here, Krieger et al. develop spatial models showing that coherent structures arising in turbulent flows in aquatic environments could have provided compartments that facilitated the origin of life.

    • Madison S. Krieger
    • , Sam Sinai
    •  & Martin A. Nowak
  • Article
    | Open Access

    High-throughput combinatorial mutagenesis assays are useful to screen the function of many different sequences but they are not exhaustive. Here, Zhou and McCandlish develop a method to impute such missing genotype-phenotype data based on inferring the least epistatic sequence-function relationship.

    • Juannan Zhou
    •  & David M. McCandlish
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Quantifying somatic evolutionary processes in cancer and healthy tissue is a challenge. Here, the authors use single time point multi-region sampling of cancer and normal tissue, combined with evolutionary theory, to quantify in vivo mutation and cell survival rates per cell division.

    • Benjamin Werner
    • , Jack Case
    •  & Andrea Sottoriva
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Strategic game payoffs often depend on the state of the environment, which in turn can be influenced by game strategies. Here, Tilman et al. develop a general framework for modeling strategic games with environmental feedbacks and analyze case studies from decision-making, ecology, and economics.

    • Andrew R. Tilman
    • , Joshua B. Plotkin
    •  & Erol Akçay
  • Article
    | Open Access

    A significant proportion of the molecular evolution of bacteria and archaea occurs through gene gain and loss. Here Iranzo et al. develop a mathematical model that explains observed differential patterns of sequence evolution vs. gene content evolution as a consequence of homologous recombination.

    • Jaime Iranzo
    • , Yuri I. Wolf
    •  & Itamar Sela
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The ‘parliament of genes’ hypothesis suggests that selfish genetic elements will be counteracted by suppressors that maintain equal transmission of the rest of the genome. Here, the authors find support for this hypothesis using mathematical models to explore a range of different scenarios.

    • Thomas W. Scott
    •  & Stuart A. West
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Models of mate choice have mainly focused on the implications of female mate choice for reproductive isolation. Here, Aubier et al. develop a population genetic model of coevolution between female and male mate choice, which can lead the population to oscillate between assortative and random mating.

    • Thomas G. Aubier
    • , Hanna Kokko
    •  & Mathieu Joron
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The spatial structure of a population is often critical for the evolution of cooperation. Here, Allen and colleagues show that when spatial structure is represented by an isothermal graph, the effective number of neighbors per individual determines whether or not cooperation can evolve.

    • Benjamin Allen
    • , Gabor Lippner
    •  & Martin A. Nowak
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The viviparity driven conflict hypothesis predicts the evolution of the placenta will suppress the evolution of traits associated with pre-copulatory mate choice and accelerate speciation rate. Furness et al. support the former and disprove the latter predictions with comparative analyses of the poecilid fishes.

    • Andrew I. Furness
    • , Bart J. A. Pollux
    •  & David N. Reznick
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mutators are expected to re-evolve low mutation rates to reduce deleterious load, but empirical evidence is mixed. Here, the authors show that load can vary across mutators and genetic backgrounds, which their simulations suggest can substantially alter antimutator dynamics.

    • Alejandro Couce
    •  & Olivier Tenaillon
  • Article
    | Open Access

    In asexual populations selection at different genomic loci can interfere with each other. Here, using a biophysical model of molecular evolution the authors show that interference results in long-term degradation of molecular function, an effect that strongly depends on genome size.

    • Torsten Held
    • , Daniel Klemmer
    •  & Michael Lässig
  • Article
    | Open Access

    What drives changes in morphological diversity? Here, Arbour et al. analyse skull 3D shape evolution across the bat radiation using µCT scan data, finding two phases of skull shape diversification, early adaptive shifts related to echolocation, and more recent shifts related to diet transitions.

    • Jessica H. Arbour
    • , Abigail A. Curtis
    •  & Sharlene E. Santana
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Reversible phenotypic plasticity is expected to be favoured by long lifespan, as this increases the environmental variation individuals experience. Here, the authors develop a model showing how phenotypic plasticity can drive selection on lifespan, leading to coevolution of these traits.

    • Irja I. Ratikainen
    •  & Hanna Kokko
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The catalytic efficiency of many enzymes is lower than the theoretical maximum. Here, the authors combine genome-scale metabolic modeling with population genetics models to simulate enzyme evolution, and find that strong epistasis limits turnover numbers due to diminishing returns of fitness gains.

    • David Heckmann
    • , Daniel C. Zielinski
    •  & Bernhard O. Palsson
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although men have lower survival across ages, women have poorer health than men as they age. Here, Archer et al. suggest that this pattern is explained by intralocus sexual conflict and provide supporting evidence from a mathematical model and experiments with Drosophila.

    • C. Ruth Archer
    • , Mario Recker
    •  & David J. Hosken
  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    Facilitation is a well-known ecological interaction among free-living species, but symbionts residing in or on a host can also positively affect other symbiont species. Here, the authors review examples of facilitation among symbionts, revealing how facilitation theory can improve understanding of these interactions.

    • Flore Zélé
    • , Sara Magalhães
    •  & Alison B. Duncan
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The degree to which species diversity is bounded by limited niche space is under debate. Here, Larcombe and colleagues show that bounded and unbounded processes contribute more-or-less equally to conifer diversification, and that it may be niche dimensionality that facilitates these opposing forces.

    • Matthew J. Larcombe
    • , Gregory J. Jordan
    •  & Steven I. Higgins
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The history and patterns of species diversity are shaped by a variety of ecological and evolutionary factors. Here, the authors develop a computational model to predict clade diversification dynamics and rates of speciation and extinction under the influences of resource competition, genetic differentiation, and random landscape fluctuation.

    • Robin Aguilée
    • , Fanny Gascuel
    •  & Regis Ferriere
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The evolution of cooperation depends on social structure, which may evolve in response. Here, Akçay models coevolution between cooperation and social network formation strategies, showing that coevolutionary feedbacks lead cooperation to collapse unless constrained by costs of social connections.

    • Erol Akçay
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans are known to use social heuristics to make intuitive decisions on whether to cooperate. Here, the authors show with evolutionary simulations that social heuristics can be an adaptive solution to uncertainties about the consequences of cooperation and can greatly increase cooperation levels.

    • Pieter van den Berg
    •  & Tom Wenseleers
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Energetic constraints produce a fundamental tradeoff in starvation and recovery rates, impacting eco-evolutionary dynamics. Here, Yeakel et al. develop a nutritional state-structured model that predicts population size as a function of body mass known as Damuth’s law, and a mechanism for Cope’s rule, the evolutionary trend towards larger body mass.

    • Justin D. Yeakel
    • , Christopher P. Kempes
    •  & Sidney Redner
  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    Gene expression and behaviours are intimately related, and their interactions can play out over timescales from developmental to evolutionary. Here, the authors review how temporal aspects of gene expression mediate behavioural responses to the environment, a key question in behavioural genomics.

    • Clare C. Rittschof
    •  & Kimberly A. Hughes
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cross-cultural interactions can cause cultural change, a process known as acculturation. Here, Erten et al. develop a model of cultural change under immigration, considering individuals’ orientations towards acculturation, and find that willingness to interact cross-culturally and resident cultural conservatism favour cultural coexistence.

    • E. Yagmur Erten
    • , Pieter van den Berg
    •  & Franz J. Weissing
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Selection for recombination requires genetic diversity and negative linkage disequilibrium, which can be produced by coevolutionary arms races. Here the authors propose a qualitatively different scenario that can favour recombination in seasonal environments through the ‘genomic storage effect’.

    • Davorka Gulisija
    •  & Joshua B. Plotkin
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Microbes live in communities and exchange metabolites, but the resulting dynamics are poorly understood. Here, the authors study the interplay between metabolite production strategies and population dynamics, and find that complex and unexpected dynamics emerge even in simple microbial economies.

    • Yoav Kallus
    • , John H. Miller
    •  & Eric Libby
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Genetic drift can reduce fitness in small populations by counteracting selection against deleterious mutations. Here, LaBar and Adami demonstrate through a mathematical model and simulations that small populations tend to evolve to drift-robust fitness peaks, which have a low likelihood of slightly-deleterious mutations.

    • Thomas LaBar
    •  & Christoph Adami
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The structure and dynamics of microbial communities reflect trade-offs in the ability to use different resources. Here, Josephides and Swain incorporate metabolic trade-offs into an eco-evolutionary model to predict networks of mutational paths and the evolutionary outcomes for microbial communities.

    • Christos Josephides
    •  & Peter S. Swain
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Early molecules of life likely served both as templates and catalysts, raising the question of how functionally distinct genomes and enzymes arose. Here, the authors show that conflict between evolution at the molecular and cellular levels can drive functional differentiation of the two strands of self-replicating molecules and lead to copy number differences between the two.

    • Nobuto Takeuchi
    • , Paulien Hogeweg
    •  & Kunihiko Kaneko
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Gene networks evolve by transcription factor (TF) duplication and divergence of their binding site specificities, but little is known about the global constraints at play. Here, the authors study the coevolution of TFs and binding sites using a biophysical-evolutionary approach, and show that the emerging complex fitness landscapes strongly influence regulatory evolution with a role for crosstalk.

    • Tamar Friedlander
    • , Roshan Prizak
    •  & Gašper Tkačik
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Diversification may be driven by diversity, a concept Calcagnoet al. explore using models of intra- and inter-specific ecological interactions. A threshold number of species is sometimes required before adaptive radiations can occur; a phenomenon they term diversity-dependent adaptive radiation.

    • Vincent Calcagno
    • , Philippe Jarne
    •  & Patrice David
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The origins of altruism have fascinated us for centuries. Here, the authors propose that altruistic behaviour could be explained by microbes manipulating their hosts to act altruistically towards other hosts that may carry related microbes, and show that microbe-mediated altruism can evolve in a wide range of circumstances.

    • Ohad Lewin-Epstein
    • , Ranit Aharonov
    •  & Lilach Hadany
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many infectious diseases are more likely to progress to serious illness or death in men than in women, which has been attributed to a stronger immune response in women. Here, the authors propose that pathogen transmission from mother to child favours the evolution of lower virulence in women, and argue that the higher risk of HTLV-1 infection progressing to leukaemia in Japanese men is due to prolonged breastfeeding in Japan.

    • Francisco Úbeda
    •  & Vincent A. A. Jansen