Evolutionary theory articles within Nature Communications

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  • 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

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Morphological characters are generally thought to have higher rates of convergence than molecular characters. Here, Zou and Zhang provide empirical evidence for this assumption and devise a method to improve the accuracy of phylogenetic reconstruction through identifying and removing convergence-prone characters.

    • Zhengting Zou
    •  & Jianzhi Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Females tend to invest more than males in caring for offspring, which has been argued to be a consequence of the small initial difference in investment in eggs versus sperm. Here, Fromhage and Jennions formalize this argument mathematically in a model of the evolution of sex roles in parental care.

    • Lutz Fromhage
    •  & Michael D. Jennions

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In fission yeast, the telomerase RNA (TER) is produced through spliceosomal cleavage. Here, Kannan et al. find that spliceosome-generated 3′ ends also occurs in other fungal TERs using distinct molecular mechanisms, suggesting multiple origins for this type of TER maturation pathway.

    • Ram Kannan
    • , Rachel M. Helston
    •  & Peter Baumann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The continual evolution of pathogens makes infectious disease control very challenging. Here the authors examine how host population structure influences disease evolution, and show that heterogeneous contact networks lower the fixation probability of newly arising pathogen strains.

    • Gabriel E. Leventhal
    • , Alison L. Hill
    •  & Sebastian Bonhoeffer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mutation, selection and random drift determine evolutionary dynamics and can give rise to polymorphisms. Here, an evolutionary game model, in which each new mutation generates a new evolutionary game, is applied to study the emergence of polymorphism, resulting in higher diversity than seen in previous models.

    • Weini Huang
    • , Bernhard Haubold
    •  & Arne Traulsen

  • Article |

    Symbiotic fungi are thought to have assisted plants in their colonization of the land. In this study, it is shown that mycorrhizal fungi symbiosis with liverwort, a member of an ancient clade of land plants, promotes photosynthetic carbon uptake and growth, supporting the role of fungi in 'the greening of the Earth'.

    • Claire P. Humphreys
    • , Peter J. Franks
    •  & David J. Beerling

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