crickets, resulting in enhanced mating success. Gravid female parasitoid £ies, Ormia ochracea, are also attracted to male cricket calling song, resulting in the death of the male within about seven days. Using playbacks of ¢eld-cricket calling song in the natural habitat, we show that both female crickets and female parasitoid £ies prefer male calling song with average numbers of pulses per trill. Thus female crickets exert stabilizing sexual selection, whereas £ies exert disruptive natural selection on male song. Disruptive natural selection will promote genetic variation and population divergence. Stabilizing sexual selection will reduce genetic variation and maintain population cohesiveness. These forces may balance andtogether maintain the observed high levels of genetic variation (ca. 40%) in male calling song. Keywords: Fisher's fundamental theorem; genetic variation; female preference; parasitoid; phonotaxis 1.

commitment, conscientiousness, costly signaling theory, equilibrium selection, emotion, empathy, ethics, evolutionary psychology, fitness indicators, genetic correlations, good genes, good parents, good partners, human courtship, kin selection, kindness, individual differences, intelligence, mate choice, mental health, moral virtues, mutation load, mutual choice, person perception, personality, reciprocal altruism, sexual fidelity, sexual selection, social cognition, virtue ethics “Human good turns out to be the activity of the soul exhibiting excellence.” Aristotle (350 BC) Moral evolution theories have emphasized kinship, reciprocity, group selection, and equilibrium selection. Yet, moral virtues are also sexually attractive. Darwin suggested that sexual attractiveness may explain many aspects of human morality. This paper updates his argument by integrating recent research on mate choice, person perception, individual differences, costly signaling, and virtue ethics. Many human virtues may have evolved in both sexes through mutual mate choice to advertise good genetic quality, parenting abilities, and/or partner traits. Such virtues may include kindness, fidelity, magnanimity, and heroism, as well as quasi-moral traits like conscientiousness, agreeableness, mental health, and intelligence. This theory leads to many testable predictions about the phenotypic features, genetic bases, and social-cognitive responses to human moral virtues. A

Sexual ornaments are favoured to be both less integrated with other organismal traits for greater expression, and yet more integrated with organismal development and functions to better indicate the physiological quality of an organism. Two conceptual approaches in morphological evolution – the consideration of internal and external processes and the evolution of integration and modularity – are useful in resolving this apparent paradox, yet these approaches are mostly overlooked in studies of the development of sexual displays. Moreover, whereas recent studies have recognized the evolutionary continuum of the mechanisms by which sexual selection operates, the consequences for the evolution of development of sexual displays are not well understood. Here I suggest that the concept of morphological integration may provide a useful framework for understanding the development and evolution of sexual ornamentation.

Abstract Siblings compete for parental care and feeding, while parents must allocate scarce resources to those offspring most likely to survive and reproduce. This could cause offspring to evolve traits that advertise health, and thereby attract parental resources. For example, experimental evidence suggests that bright orange filaments covering the heads of North American coot chicks may have evolved for this fitness-advertising purpose. Could any human mental disorders be the equivalent of dull filaments in coot chicks—low-fitness extremes of mental abilities that evolved as fitness indicators? One possibility is autism. Suppose that the ability of very young children to charm their parents evolved as a parentally selected fitness indicator. Young children would vary greatly in their ability to charm parents, that variation would correlate with underlying fitness, and autism could be the lowfitness extreme of this variation. This view explains many seemingly disparate facts about autism and leads to some surprising and testable predictions.

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Research article The genetic architecture of fitness in a seed beetle: assessing the potential for indirect genetic benefits of female choice

Research article Direct selection on male attractiveness and female preference fails to produce a response

Research article Genetic covariance between indices of body condition and immunocompetence in a passerine bird

Condition-dependent expression of red colour differs between

Variation in the age at onset of a multifactorial disease often reflects variation in cause. Here we show a linear latitudinal gradient in the mean age at onset of schizophrenia in 13 northern hemisphere cities, ranging from 25 years old in Cali, Columbia (at 4 ° north) to 35 years old in Moscow, Russia (at 56 ° north). To our knowledge, this striking association has not been previously reported. We consider several explanations, including the effects of pathogen stress, natural selection, sexual selection, migration, life-history profiles, or some combination of these factors, and we propose a test of competing causal hypotheses.