A new website at googlepages

This is one of my newest pages
I like the google pages editor its very simple and easy.
Its great for getting something on to the web quickly.

my googlepages site can be visited by clicking on the title of this post

The report for this project is on Google!

It seems rather strange but a copy of my MSc dissertation has
now appeared on Google. quite near the top of the page if you google james eales like this


I've been trying to get my personal webpage here
into the google index for ages but im still waiting for my department to link to it.

Because i would like people to be able to google my name and find out what I do.

In reference to the work on this project, I am now starting to do some redesign and simulation reruns. Working Tom Tregenza at Exeter and hopefully with a bit of input from Jason Noble, we should be able to get together quite a good manuscript for publication.

Alright not quite the last

I can't believe i found this, i may be wrong, but no one in the sexual selection field seems to refer to this.

Which is truly bizarre because its basically saying how the lek paradox could be resolved (well kind of) as well as how heterozygous deleterious can be purged. Recombination is the answer to everything.

Section 11.3.5 from Ridley's Evolution pp289-293

This is section included in a larger section on the discussion of the function of sex. It is not strongly linked to discussion of sexual selection yet it provides very interesting thoughts on how sexual reproduction (i.e. reproduction with recombination) is a good system for removing heterozygous mutations.

The whole argument reminds me of the quote from Darwin in "A Devils Advocate" (Dawkins) "What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature"

This is exactly what Ridleys section is describing, that recombination, by allowing new combinations of alleles promotes the formation of more very high quality individuals as well as promoting the formation of more very low quality individuals. Evolution is being wasteful, but in a way that allows the continued maintenance of genetic quality and explusion/purging of deleterious mutations (even those at heterozygous loci).

Because this is more of an argument for how the costly process of sexual reproduction may have evolved, the ideas expressed are not mentioned in any of the rest of the literature.

This would be a good thing to include in the dissertation.

Final set of notes

This is the last set of notes i'm going to write up and post.

I like this paper a lot, its very simple short and yet provides some very strong evidence. Its probably been entirely disproved by now,seen as though it was written in 1980, but i can't find anything else on it so im citing it anyway.

Partridge, L. 1980, MAte Choice increases a component of offsrping fitness in fruit flies. Nature, 283, pp290-291.

A very useful and important short "letters" article. This provides basal empirical evidence that in Drosophila, offspring produced from a "choosy" mating are consistently better competitors during larval development than offspring produced by random matings.

The difference was small but consistent.

Need to go and write things on my dissertation now.

More notes

Just got home from Northampton

Its way too early in the morning

This paper was vry useful for evidence for things.
Anyway these are some notes i've just typed up.

Roberts, S.C. and Gosling, L.M., 2003, Genetic similarity and quality interact iun mate choice decisions by female mice. Nature Genetics,35(1),pp103-106.

AKA the mouse paper.

Lots of detailed empirical data involving mouse mating decisions. The thesis of it all is that female mice make mate choices based on traditional good genes traits (scent marking frequency) and also based on genetic dissimilarity at MHC loci.

It is imprortant that mice use more than one strategy, as a lot of theory seems to try to pigeon hole species into using one strategy, this is total madness, surely females will use any strategy possible given the right conditions, if it can work then it will most likely exist.

The final important point is that the female mice switched their strategy based on the males they had to choose btween. If male diversity in the good genes marker was low, they choose using dissimilarity and vice versa. Importantly however was the fact that females would always look for the good genes marker first. This is like a stepped rule method, could it be extended to a decision tree-like process.

More notes

I wrote out these notes ages ago, only just posted them to show that I have actually read the most central paper in my project.

Tomkins, J.L. et al, 2004, Genic capture and resolving the lek paradox, TREE, 19(6), pp323-328.

Good paper, many relevent points, most important for discussion of the concept of condition-dependancy. This is a good validation point for the number of simulated loci. The idea that many loci contribute to traits that are good markers for good genes selection.

"Houle argued that the relatively high genetic variance of fitness-related life-history traits could be explained by their dependance on many underlying physiological and morphological traits, such that they sum genetic variation over many loci. This multitude of loci provides a large mutational target[15] that is resistant to erosion through directiona selection."

This is there resolution of the lek paradox, it is certainly a conducive argument and is mainly intuitive in nature, good properties for a theoretical argument.

on Mutations and the genetics of condition:
"Empiricists should now focus on determining the genetic basis of condition itself, a process that will help define the very nature of `good genes'"

"A unique prediction of the genic capture hypothesis is that mutations is that mutations at most loci throughout the genome should affect the expression of sexually selected traits".

This is an important assumption of my model.

They also make an important and novel point that in sexual conflict species, through mate manipulation, males are able to obtain matings when ordinarily females would reject them. This is another reason for how genetic diversity is maintained at sexually selected loci. This hypothesis predicts fluctuations in mutational load as the intersexual arms race also fluctuates.

Got lots of good references from this review paper, too many to write up here.

Recombination

This is a little figure i drew in Xfig, but from within Windows, exciting.
It should go into the final dissertation file.