0000000000326828
AUTHOR
John M. Mcnamara
Quantifying male attractiveness
Genetic models of sexual selection are concerned with a dynamic process in which female preference and male trait values coevolve. We present a rigorous method for characterizing evolutionary endpoints of this process in phenotypic terms. In our phenotypic characterization the mate-choice strategy of female population members determines how attractive females should find each male, and a population is evolutionarily stable if population members are actually behaving in this way. This provides a justification of phenotypic explanations of sexual selection and the insights into sexual selection that they provide. Furthermore, the phenotypic approach also has enormous advantages over a genetic…
Simple learning rules to cope with changing environments
10 pages; International audience; We consider an agent that must choose repeatedly among several actions. Each action has a certain probability of giving the agent an energy reward, and costs may be associated with switching between actions. The agent does not know which action has the highest reward probability, and the probabilities change randomly over time. We study two learning rules that have been widely used to model decision-making processes in animals-one deterministic and the other stochastic. In particular, we examine the influence of the rules' 'learning rate' on the agent's energy gain. We compare the performance of each rule with the best performance attainable when the agent …
An evolutionary perspective on stress responses, damage and repair
Variation in stress responses has been investigated in relation to environmental factors, species ecology, life history and fitness. Moreover, mechanistic studies have unravelled molecular mechanisms of how acute and chronic stress responses cause physiological impacts (‘damage’), and how this damage can be repaired. However, it is not yet understood how the fitness effects of damage and repair influence stress response evolution. Here we study the evolution of hormone levels as a function of stressor occurrence, damage and the efficiency of repair. We hypothesise that the evolution of stress responses depends on the fitness consequences of damage and the ability to repair that damage. To o…
Cross inhibition improves activity selection when switching incurs time costs
Abstract We consider a behavioural model of an animal choosing between two activities, based on positive feedback, and examine the effect of introducing cross inhibition between the motivations for the two activities. While cross-inhibition has previously been included in models of decision making, the question of what benefit it may provide to an animal’s activity selection behaviour has not previously been studied. In neuroscience and in collective behaviour cross-inhibition, and other equivalent means of coupling evidence-accumulating pathways, have been shown to approximate statistically-optimal decision-making and to adaptively break deadlock, thereby improving decision performance. Sw…
Understanding the placebo effect from an evolutionary perspective
Abstract A placebo is a treatment which is not effective through its direct action on the body, but works because of its effect on the patient's beliefs. From an evolutionary perspective, it is initially puzzling why, if people are capable of recovering, they need a placebo to do so. Based on an argument put forward by Humphrey [Great expectations: the evolutionary psychology of faith-healing and the placebo effect. In: Humphrey, N (2002). The mind made flesh. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 255–285], we present simple mathematical models of the placebo effect that involve a trade-off between the costs and benefits of allocating resources to a current problem. These models show why the eff…