Why adaptation can depress population fitness, and why thinking about it can be enlightening
- Date: Jul 23, 2024
- Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Hanna Kokko
- Institute of Organismal and Molecular Evolution, University of Mainz, Germany
- Location: MPI BI Seewiesen
- Room: Seewiesen seminar room House 4, Streaming in NQ105, MPI BI Martinsried
- Host: Bart Kempenaers
- Contact: bart.kempenaers@bi.mpg.de
Natural selection improves population fitness. Right? Well, actually, it is complicated. If individuals can gain an fitness advantage over conspecifics, traits can evolve despite making population performance poorer. I will discuss this with examples involving territorial competition as well as competition for matings, and then ask the audience to step ourside their comfort zone – in case the comfort zone contains the assumption that every organism has a mother and a father. Sexual conflict works quite differently if these assumptions are broken, and the journey to understand why this is the case is quite though-provoking.