The mapping of environment, through variation in individuals' life histories, to dynamics can be complex and often poorly known. Consequently, it is not clear how important it is dynamically. To explore this, I incorporated lessons from an empirical system, a soil mite, into an individual-based model. Individuals compete for resource and allocate this according to eight 'genetic' rules that spe...

Human health and diseases are influenced by genes and environments [1]. Recent advances in measures of genetic influences have led to calls for parallel advancements in methods to measure environments [2,3]. The article by Baud et al. [4] in the January 2017 issue suggests one provocative path forward: measure the genomes of proximate individuals. “Social genetic effects” (SGEs, Baud et al. [4]...

Humans vary in acuity to many odors [1-4], with variation within olfactory receptor (OR) genes contributing to these differences [5-9]. How such variation also affects odor experience and food selection remains uncertain [10], given that such effects occur for taste [11-15]. Here we investigate β-ionone, which shows extreme sensitivity differences [4, 16, 17]. β-ionone is a key aroma in foods a...

AN IMPORTANT SOURCE of current misunderstanding and controversy about diet-disease relationships is the inappropriate extrapolation of evidence from group data to the individual and vice versa. In this editorial piece the difference is illustrated between correlations of risk factors and disease found in individuals and those found between populations. An attempt is made to clarify the causal i...

AIMS To estimate the magnitude of genetic and environmental influences on timing of first alcohol use and alcohol dependence (AD) and to quantify the overlap in these influences across the two alcohol-related outcomes. PARTICIPANTS The sample consisted of 5382 twins (2691 complete pairs), aged 24-36 years, from the Australian Twin Registry. MEASUREMENTS History of alcohol use and DSM-IV alc...

In animals, including humans, the social environment can serve as a public information network in which individuals can gather public information about the quality of potential mates by observing conspecifics during sexual interactions. The observing individual itself is also a part of this information network. When recognized by the observed conspecifics as an audience, his/her presence could ...

Two types of interventions are commonly implemented in networks: characteristic intervention which influences individuals' intrinsic incentives, and structural targets at the social links among individuals. In this paper we provide a general framework to evaluate distinct equilibrium effects both interventions. We identify hidden equivalence between an endogenously determined intervention. Comp...

IQ predicts many measures of life success, as well as trajectories of brain development. Prolonged cortical thickening observed in individuals with high IQ might reflect an extended period of synaptogenesis and high environmental sensitivity or plasticity. We tested this hypothesis by examining the timing of changes in the magnitude of genetic and environmental influences on IQ as a function of...

Research examining face-to-face status hierarchies suggests that individuals attain respect and admiration by engaging in behavior that influences others' judgments of their value to the group. Building on this research, we expected that high-status individuals would be less likely to engage in behaviors that violate group norms and expectations, relative to low-status individuals. Adolescent p...

Little is known about the genetic contribution to individual differences in neural networks subserving cognition function. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) twin study, we found a significant genetic influence on brain activation in neural networks supporting digit working memory tasks. Participants activating frontal-parietal networks responded faster than individuals relyin...