The relation between R. A. Fisher’s sexy-son hypothesis and W. D. Hamilton’s greenbeard effect
Date
03/05/2018Keywords
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Abstract
Recent years have seen a growing interest in the overlap between the theories of kin selection and sexual selection. One potential overlap is with regards to whether R. A. Fisher's “sexy‐son” hypothesis, concerning the evolution of extravagant sexual ornamentation, may be framed in terms of W. D. Hamilton's greenbeard effect, concerning scenarios in which individuals carry an allele that allows them to recognize and behave differently toward other carriers of the same allele. Specifically, both scenarios involve individuals behaving differently toward social partners who exhibit a phenotypic marker, with linkage disequilibrium between marker and behavior loci ensuring genetic relatedness between actor and recipient at the behavior locus. However, the formal connections between the two theories remain unclear. Here, we develop these connections by: (1) asking what kind of greenbeard is involved in the sexy‐son hypothesis; (2) exploring the relationship between the problem of “falsebeards” and the “lek paradox”; (3) investigating whether these two problems may be resolved in analogous ways; and (4) determining whether population structure facilitates both of these evolutionary phenomena. By building this conceptual bridge, we are able to import results from the field of kin selection to sexual selection, and vice versa, yielding new insights into both topics.
Citation
Faria , G , Varela , S & Gardner , A 2018 , ' The relation between R. A. Fisher’s sexy-son hypothesis and W. D. Hamilton’s greenbeard effect ' , Evolution Letters , vol. Early View . https://doi.org/10.1002/evl3.53
Publication
Evolution Letters
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2056-3744Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2018 The Author(s). Evolution Letters published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) and European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
This work was supported by Portuguese National Funds, through FCT– Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia, within the cE3c Unit funding UID/BIA/00329/2013, as well as through GFS PhD Scholarship (SFRH/BD/109726/2015) and through SAMV Post-Doctoral Research Grant (PTDC/BIA-ANM/0810/14), and by a Natural Environment Research Council Independent Research Fellowship (AG, Grant Number NE/K009524/1).Collections
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