The Monarch butterfly has a random geometric probability of .81%, or less than 1 chance out of 100 of mating success. Males increase mating success by depositing more sperm thus reducing competition. Females increase mating success by mating more frequently thus increasing their chances of producing offspring. Introduction Monarch butterflies often find larger symmetric females more attractive....

Generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) are typically constructed by incorporating random effects into the linear predictor. The random effects are usually assumed to be normally distributed with mean zero and variance-covariance identity matrix. In this paper, we propose to release random effects to non-normal distributions and discuss how to model the mean and covariance structures in GLMMs s...

Borderline personality disorder is a severe personality disorder for which genetic research has been limited to family studies and classical twin studies. These studies indicate that genetic effects explain 35 to 45% of the variance in borderline personality disorder and borderline personality features. However, effects of non-additive (dominance) genetic factors, non-random mating and cultural...

Although sexual selection can provide benefits to both sexes, it also can be costly because of expanded opportunities for intersexual conflict. We evaluated the role of sexual selection in a naturally promiscuous species, Drosophila melanogaster. In two replicate populations, sexual selection was removed through enforced monogamous mating with random mate assignment or retained in promiscuous c...

Evolutionary research continues to discover new features of human mate preferences, but the downstream consequences of these preferences for mate selection have been insufficiently explored. Some have inferred that stated preferences have few behavioral consequences given seemingly weak effects of preferences in predicting mating outcomes. Here we test this inference with data from simulated ma...

Determining the genetic structure of populations is becoming an increasingly important aspect of genetic studies. One of the most frequently used methods is the calculation of F-statistics using an Analysis of Molecular Variance (AMOVA). However, this has the drawback that the population hierarchy has to be known a priori. Therefore, the population structure is often based on the results of a c...

We define and establish the interrelationships of four components of statistical association between a diploid nuclear gene and a uniparentally transmitted, haploid cytoplasmic gene: an allelic (gametic) disequilibrium (D), which measures associations between alleles at the two loci; and three genotypic disequilibria (D1, D2, D3), which measure associations between two cytotypes and the three r...

We tested the hypothesis that mating strategies with genomic information realise lower rates of inbreeding (∆F) than with pedigree information without compromising rates of genetic gain (∆G). We used stochastic simulation to compare ∆F and ∆G realised by two mating strategies with pedigree and genomic information in five breeding schemes. The two mating strategies were minimum-coancestry mating...