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Andrew F. Read Professor Institute of Cell, Animal & Population Biology University of Edinburgh, Scotland |
| C E N T E R F O R T H E I N T E G R A T I V E S T U D Y O F A N I M A L B E H A V I O R |
| S P E A K E R S E R I E S |
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Andrew F. Read Professor Institute of Cell, Animal & Population Biology University of Edinburgh, Scotland |
Can Extraordinary Sex Ratios Explain Malaria?
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| Guest Lecture for Spring 2001 Graduate Seminar: Interdisciplinary Seminar in Animal Behavior | International Hamilton Symposium |
ABSTRACT:Sex allocation theory should reassure biologists with physics envy, and lay to rest criticisms that evolutionary biology is not a predictive science. It provides the best empirical argument for a gene-centred view of evolution, and proves that the adaptationist programme is not vacuous. All this because, unlike most of evolutionary biology, sex allocation theory has made novel, quantitative predictions that have turned out to be correct. Most of this success has flowed from Hamilton's discovery (1967) of local mate competition in parasitoid wasps, and the ideas have been generalised to plants and other metazoans. Yet they should also apply to the causal agents of some of the most serious diseases of humans and livestock. Analysis of sex ratios in these organisms is not only interesting in its own right, but may also provide insight into matters of clinical and epidemiological significance. Importantly, if infectious diseases do not yield to sex allocation theory, there is little reason to think that adaptationist arguments concerning more complex phenotypes like virulence - an important component of what is optimistically known as Darwinian Medicine - will progress much beyond Just-So stories. Moreover, as Hamilton (1975) appreciated long before anyone else, models of virulence evolution and sex ratio evolution may be mathematically isomorphic. Members of the genus Plasmodium cause malaria; they also have a sex ratio. Does this mean evolutionary biology can be useful as well as interesting? RELATED READING West, S. A., C. M. Lively, and A. F. Read. 1999. A pluralist approach to sex and recombination. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 12:1003-1012. ONLINE RESOURCES: 
ICAPB page for Prof. Read Remote Animal Behavior Expert - Dr. Andrew F. Reed (student questions & responses, 1996) |
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