T. Gale, A. B. Gibson, R. C. Brooks, M. Garratt Journal of Evolutionary Biology. DOI: 10.1111/jeb.12192 Abstract In mammals, allocation to reproduction can either be primed or suppressed in relation to cues from other individuals. Some conspecifics (e.g. potential mates)…
This week I’ve been wrestling with a particularly large writing project which has kept me away from posting in this column. But, staring into my Twitter feed in procrastination, I spotted much outrage about a paper on the adaptive basis…
Melinda Gates wrote a powerful piece for CNN on the occasion of the Women Deliver conference in Kuala Lumpur. Empowered women make nations strong. The usually spot-on Hugo Schwyzer gets it dead wrong in the Atlantic: “What if Men Stopped…
What’s she doing with that snake? And what does that have to do with cereal? Sexcereal.com “This,” as I believe it is now fashionable to say, “is actually a thing.” Where by this I mean Sexcereal. A his and hers…
Why would an otherwise healthy animal stop reproducing? Natural selection usually favours genes that elevate reproductive success because the very act of reproduction is how genes proliferate. So adaptations that involve self-limited reproduction call for unusual evolutionary explanations. Sterile worker…
This is a new and, hopefully, regular kind of post. Shamelessly imitating Jason Collins’ excellent “Week of links” posts over at Evolving Economics. I’ll list some news items and interesting reads I have encountered for the first time during the…
Becoming a parent isn’t easy. Okay, conceiving can be far too easy. But I mean all that stuff about nappies and midnight feeds, and the germs they bring back from daycare, and trying to understand school newsletters. That’s the difficult…
This weekend I gained a grudging appreciation for Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Governator, not the Terminator. Having watched Arnie’s political rise and fall from afar, he always seemed an odd chimera. Lines he’d delivered as the Terminator retrofitted to an ideology…
Ultimately, our ability to convincingly lie to each other may have evolved as a direct result of our cooperative nature. Thus concludes the abstract of a new paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B that considers the…
The poor old placenta. It really doesn’t get much public attention. And yet it does a crucially important job – acting as the interface between the mother’s blood supply and that of her developing foetus. Every molecule of glucose, oxygen…