Questions tagged [fitness]
The fitness tag has no usage guidance.
37 questions
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What causes the activation of "Late acting deleterious genes" in late age but not in young age, whose accumulation causes ageing according to Medawar?
Sir Peter Medawar proposed that aging is the byproduct of "late acting deleterious genes". Evolution is good at weeding out genetic mutations that are harmful at an young age, before the ...
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How to get an adaptive landscape from a fitness function?
In Schluter (2000), it is mentioned that one can convert a fitness function (see image (a)) to an adaptive landscape (see (b) and (c)). The key is to calculate the mean phenotype of a population and ...
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What does genetic diversity in one species have to do with survival rate when an epidemic spreads?
I was studying about genes, and soon remembered that the more diverse the genetics of one species, the less the chance of the species to go extinct from natural disaster.
One instance was an epidemic ...
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What is the mathematical relationship between selection coefficient and dN/dS
dN/dS is often used as a measure of the intensity of selective pressure on a mutation or gene, but I'm curious about how it can be written as a function of the selection coefficient. I'm specifically ...
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Visualizing the effect of selection on a population with a fitness landscape in R
I am trying to write a script to demonstrate the effect of selection in a population. The problem that I have is that it is not realistic in the sense that not only the mean would change for ...
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Why is this the equation for the fitness of cooperators?
This paper gives the equations as:
The fitness of cooperators and defectors is respectively given by fC = b(i − 1)/(N − 1) − c and fD = bi/(N − 1).
c - cost
b - benefit
i - number of cooperators
N - ...
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Why exactly would a big, tropical, dangerous spider not thrive if imported to a "cold" climate location such as Sweden?
Whenever I have put forward the idea that somebody could capture a bunch of disgusting, huge spiders from Australia, fly them to Sweden and just let them out in the woods nearby houses, and they will ...
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Is there a vertical measure of appearance of a genotype over generations?
Is there some kind of a vertical measure of appearance of a genotype $g$ throughout ancestry, i.e. a measure of how many ancestors of $g$ had genotype $g$. Like for example in saying that on average ...
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How would inserting a nonfunctional protein impact fitness of an organism?
Producing proteins costs energy, and producing longer proteins costs more energy than shorter proteins. Producing proteins which have no function, would therefore presumably negatively impact the ...
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Why do humans lose subcutaneous fat from the extremities with age?
Why does fat tissue die and shrink on the hands, knees, and lower legs of most people as they age, even when they are overweight?
In most people, their bone definition becomes much more visible around ...
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What to call a trait that has current utility but unclear evolutionary origin?
I'm looking for a commonly used term to describe a trait that has clear current utility but an evolutionary origin that is uncertain and that we do not necessarily wish to emphasize in our description ...
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Do beneficial viruses exist? If so, what examples are there?
Typically, people call viruses some kind of organic compounds that cannot reproduce autonomously and which lower the fitness of their hosts. Even the word "virus" means "venom" in Latin.
But from the ...
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What problem does kin selection solve?
I'm trying to understand what problem led to a development of kin selection.
The explanations I've found consist roughly of the following:
The existence of some altruistic and cooperative ...
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What is the reproductive success of a biting mosquito?
Female mosquito can lay ~50-100 eggs in each batch. It takes some time between the hatch and until the time the female mosquito bits. During this time many of them will die.
What is the average ...
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What is the difference between absolute and relative fitness?
It's seems to me that the definition of relative and absolute fitness is not that clear.
Absolute fitness[edit]
The absolute fitness (W) of a genotype is defined as the proportional
change ...
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In a fitness landscape, is fitness relative or absolute?
I was asked if the fitness of a fitness landscape is absolute or relative.
Fitness landscapes are usually graphed with a fitness function that uses either phenotypes or genotypes in relation to ...
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Kin selection Vs altruism (social biology)
I know that this is a contentious topic and I found conflicting explanations online which is what prompted me to put his question up. In some papers, Kin selection is mentioned based off the concept ...
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Is survival probability the same thing as relative fitness?
I created a model where I calculate the survival probabilities from a Mark-recapture design.
I'm wondering if I can call the survival probabilities as "relative fitness".
Phenotype or genotype: $...
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Do animals get "unhealthily" fat in the wild?
Looking at a picture of a seriously fat cat, apparently directly nurtured by humans, popping up in a language learning app, I started wondering:
do animals "in the wild" (this might be ambiguous, but ...
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How does natural selection process escape from local optima? [closed]
How does natural selection process escape from local optima towards global optimum in a fitness landscape during evolution?
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Can growth rate be used as an indicator of fitness in fish populations?
I would like to calculate selection gradients in order to gain insight into the strength and type of selection influencing my study population.
(see here for review. http://jgking.web.unc.edu/files/...
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Adaptation by standing genetic variation and fitness variance [duplicate]
I've read a couple of paper on Fisher's Fundamental Theory of Natural selection that states:
$W(t+1) = W(t) + Var_{W}(t)$
Given a population with some degree of genetic variability, and assuming that ...
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What's the difference between evolution fitness and reproductive success?
What's the difference biological fitness and reproductive success in the biological terminology?
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How to calculate relative fitness from absolute fitness with recapture data?
In Grant 1986, it says:
For this analysis the absolute fitness of an individual id scored as 0 if it disappeared and 1 if it survived, and these scores are then ...
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The evolution of poor eyesight: is there weaker selection in modern humans? [duplicate]
Short question:
Poor eyesight might have been a major impediment to survival and reproduction in early man (say, 100,000 years ago), but, with the advent of agriculture, major cultural changes, and ...
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What causes humans to be physically weak compared to animals like gorillas?
Animals like gorillas seem to have a physical fitness and muscle mass that don't depend as strongly on how much exercise they get, compared to humans. E.g. gorillas living in the wild sleep and rest a ...
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Is it possible to consciously increase or decrease your own heart beat? [closed]
By doing yoga, can we manipulate our own heart beat? Is that possible for humans?
user20865
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Can we predict a person's tolerance to cold exposure during excercise?
Being an amateur athlete and student of anatomy I've always wanted to know if there is a formula for determining an unconditioned body's tolerance to cold temperatures while exercising.
I know the ...
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Why don't the genetic similarities between ‘unrelated’ individuals of the same and different species outweigh the differences?
Ever since starting to learn about the concept of inclusive fitness during my BSc, I've been bugged by this questions: if inclusive fitness can account for many ‘altruistic’ behaviors, why don't the ...
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Negative association between habitat quality and reproductive success in birds
I'm looking for bird studies that have found either a negative correlation or no correlation between habitat quality and reproductive success.
Or in other words, bird studies that have found that ...
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Are there any examples of how to apply evolutionary models?
Apologies if this question it too open-ended; evolutionary biology is not my primary field.
I have been reading a lot about the use of statistical mechanics in analyzing evolutionary dynamics. As an ...
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Which monkey species features two distinct male phenotypes?
I remember coming across a popular science article years ago about a monkey species which featured two male genotypes: the first were good looking males who acquired social status (as alphas or betas) ...
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How is it possible for the absolute fitness to be more than 1?
The wikipedia definition of Absolute fitness is "the ratio between the number of individuals with that genotype after selection to those before selection. It is calculated for a single generation and ...
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Is it easier to burn a calorie of fat or a calorie of a carbohydrate?
Say someone eats 100 calories of chocolate vs. 100 calories of carrots. Something tells me that eating the chocolate will lead to you generating more fat. Will it? Is it harder to burn the calories ...
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What indices can we use to describe fitness landscapes?
We usually talk of smooth or rugged fitness landscape.
Are there any (standard) indices to measure the "structure" of fitness landscapes?
For example, one might consider the mean epistatic ...
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Under what conditions does the body burn fats, proteins and carbohydrates?
Searching the internet, I have found lots of conflicting information from various fitness sites concerning when the human body burns fats, proteins and carbohydrates.
My basic understanding was that ...
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Measuring fitness / lifetime reproductive success (LRS) in Drosophila
I am planning a fitness assay of Drosophila melanogaster. I'd like to get a good measure of lifetime reproductive success (lrs) but I don't want to count all the offspring produced over a lifetime by ...
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