Personalities are general properties of humans and other animals. Different personality traits are phenotypically correlated, and heritabilities of personality traits have been reported in humans and various animals. In great tits, consistent heritable differences have been found in relation to exploration, which is correlated with various other personality traits. In this paper, we investigate...

Studying the geographic variation of phenotypic traits can provide key information about the potential adaptive function of alternative phenotypes. Gloger’s rule posits that animals should be darkvs. light-colored in warm and humid vs. cold and dry habitats, respectively. The rule is based on the assumption that melanin pigments and/or dark coloration confer selective advantages in warm and hum...

Contemporary genetic association studies may test hundreds of thousands of genetic variants for association, often with multiple binary and continuous traits or under more than one model of inheritance. Many of these association tests may be correlated with one another because of linkage disequilibrium between nearby markers and correlation between traits and models. Permutation tests and simul...

Genetic parameters from both single-trait and bivariate analyses for prolificacy, weight, and wool traits were estimated using REML with animal models for Targhee sheep from data collected from 1950 to 1998 at the U.S. Sheep Experiment Station, Dubois, ID. Breeding values from both single-trait and seven-trait analyses calculated with the parameters estimated from the single-trait and bivariate...

Sibling competition has been proposed as an important evolutionary pressure driving interspecific variation in developmental rates. We tested this hypothesis using rates of extra-pair paternity and brood parasitism, as well as the degree of hatching asynchrony, as indices of sibling competition in a comparative analysis of 70 species of bird. We found mixed support for the influence of sibling ...

Robustness to genetic or environmental disturbances is often considered as a key property of living systems. Yet, in spite being discussed since the 1950s, how robustness emerges from complexity architectures and it evolves still remains unclear. In particular, whether not independent various sources perturbations conditions range adaptive scenarios that can be considered. For instance, selecti...