Surprising evolutionary predictions from enhanced ecological realism

Abstract

A focus on the eco-evolutionary feedback continually operating between a population's evolution and its environment helps to appreciate the generality of ESS theory. Here we illustrate, through a sequence of four examples, how respecting such feedback in the evolutionary dynamics of quantitative traits may result in qualitatively unexpected outcomes. Reviewing existing insights and complementing these with new results, we show (1) that evolutionary matrix games are fundamentally degenerate and allow a natural unfolding, (2) that selection-driven extinction may not be rare in nature, (3) that evolutionary epidemiology should not rely on R 0 maximization, and (4) why the occurrence of Hardy-Weinberg proportions generically requires an evolutionary explanation. r 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Adaptive dynamics for physiologically structured population models

“…We will now point out in Proposition 7 an indirect connection between E = 2U T C 10 U and the dimension of the feedback environment (Meszéna et al 2006;Dieckmann and Metz 2006). As a corollary, Proposition 5 may be recovered, as at most N types can stably coexist in an N -dimensional environment (Meszéna and Metz 1999;Meszéna et al 2006).…”

The hawk–dove game in a sexually reproducing species explains a colourful polymorphism of an endangered bird

“…For example, both morphs can go extinct when annual survival is relatively high, whereas one of them (black) persists indefinitely when survival of adults is lower ('valley of death', pink region in the electronic supplementary material, figure S1). This is a case of evolutionary suicide sensu [16]: extinction does not occur because of intrinsic problems of habitat availability or survival, but because morph frequencies evolve in an unsustainable direction. In this population fitness valley, hawks are competent enough to take over nest sites from doves and to breed relatively successfully, but are still not successful enough to maintain the productivity of the population in the absence of the healthy population growth that doves provide.…”

When Do Optimisation Arguments Make Evolutionary Sense?

“…To this end, R 0 is considered as a function of the disease's demographic parameters, which in turn are envisaged as functions of some underlying trait vector that is supposed to be under evolutionary control. Here we consider, following [8], how this dogma fares in the light of Propositions 3.13 and 3.14 (see also [7]). …”

“…However, for a proof we have to deal with the fact that, for instance, in model (iii) R should be non-monotone relative to whatever summary variable even when its domain is restricted to the realisable values of S and in addition to an infinitesimal neighborhood of those combinations of (α,β) andŜ(α, β) for which R(α,β|Ŝ(α, β)) = 1. The necessary technicalities can be found in [8,Appendix A]. For the present exposition it suffices to note that in cases (iii) and (iv) the directions dα/dβ in (α 0 , β 0 ) of the contour lines {(α, β)|R(α, β|S(α 0 , β 0 ), I(α 0 , β 0 )) = 1} and {(α, β)|R(α 0 , β 0 )|S(α, β), I(α, β)) = 1}, which can be determined by implicit differentiation, are generically different.…”