... Equation, a profound insight into the nature of selection and the basis for the modern theories of kin and group selection; (ii) the theory of games and animal behavior, based on the concept of the evolutionarily stable strategy; and (iii) the modern interpretation of Fisher’s fundamental theorem of natural selection, Fisher’s theorem being perhaps the most cited and least understood idea in the history of evolutionary genetics. This paper summarizes Price’s contributions and briefly outlines why, toward the end of his painful intellectual journey, he chose to focus his deep humanistic feelings and sharp,

... This paper analyses abstract properties of selective systems to understand the evolutionary dynamics that occur within organisms. The Price Equation and Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection, two of the most powerful concepts in evolutionary genetics, are applied in a general way to internal selective systems in learning and development. This analysis emphasizes generative mechanisms and selective filters as genetically controlled phenotypes of individual organisms. Generative mechanisms create the variation on which selection acts. Selective filters determine the extent to which selection within the organism optimizes organismal performance. The methods of Price and Fisher provide a general way in which to partition evolutionary change into improvements caused by selection and the tendency of high performance variants to deteriorate because of competition or environmental change. This balance between selective improvement, at a rate equal to the variance in fitness, and a matching deterioration in performance, provides general insight into the common properties of adaptive systems in genetics, learning and development. These ideas are applied to a model of honey bee foraging. This example clarifies the relation between genes and phenotypes controlled by internal selective systems

evolution; Fisher’s fundamental theorem; information theory; population genetics. In biology, information flows from the environment to the genome by the process of natural selection. However, it has not been clear precisely what sort of information metric properly describes natural selection. Here, I show that Fisher information arises as the intrinsic metric of natural selection and evolutionary dynamics. Maximizing the amount of Fisher information about the environment captured by the population leads to Fisher’s fundamental theorem of natural selection, the most profound statement about how natural selection influences evolutionary dynamics. I also show a relation between Fisher information and Shannon information (entropy) that may help to unify the correspondence between information and dynamics. Finally, I discuss

The occurrence of cooperation poses a problem for the biological and social sciences. However, many aspects of the biological and social science literatures on this subject have developed relatively independently, with a lack of interaction. This has led to a number of misunderstandings with regard to how natural selection operates, and the conditions under which cooperation can be favoured. Our aim here is to provide an accessible overview of social evolution theory and the evolutionary work on cooperation, emphasising common misconceptions.

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Comparative studies of the genetic architecture of di€erent types of traits were initially prompted by the expectation that traits under strong directional selection (®tness traits) should have lower levels of genetic variability than those mainly under weak stabilizing selection (non®tness traits). Hence, early comparative studies revealing lower heritabilities of ®tness than non®tness traits were ®rst framed in terms of giving empirical support for this prediction, but subsequent treatments have e€ectively reversed this view. Fitness traits seem to have higher levels of additive genetic variance than non®tness traits Ð an observation that has been explained in terms of the larger number loci in¯uencing ®tness as compared to non®tness traits. This hypothesis about the larger functional architecture of ®tness than non®tness traits is supported by their higher mutational variability, which is hard to reconcile without evoking capture of mutational variability over many loci. The lower heritabilities of ®tness than non®tness traits, despite the higher additive genetic variance of the former, occur because of their higher residual variances. Recent comparative studies of dominance contributions for di€erent types of traits, together with theoretical predictions and a large body of indirect evidence, suggest an important role of dominance variance in determining levels of residual variance for ®tness-traits. The role of epistasis should not be discounted either, since a large number of loci increases the potential for epistatic interactions, and epistasis is strongly implicated in hybrid breakdown.

Abstract not found