The traits involved in sexual selection, such as male secondary sexual characteristics and female mate choice, often co-evolve which can promote population differentiation. However, the genetic architecture of these phenotypes can influence their evolvability and thereby affect the divergence of species. The extraordinary diversity of East African cichlid fishes is often attributed to strong se...

This thesis considers the evolution and the consequences of mate choice across a variety of taxa, using game theoretic, population genetic, and quantitative genetic modelling techniques. Part I is about the evolution of mate choice. In chapter 2, a population genetic model shows that mate choice is even beneficial in self-fertilising species such as Saccharomyces yeast. In chapter 3, a game the...

Rockfish species of the genus Sebastes are notable for being numerous and diverse. Rockfishes are unusual among fish because they fertilize their eggs internally and release live, swimming larvae. They undergo complex courting behaviors, which may allow females to be selective about their mates. The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is implicated as having an important influence on mate se...

The net effect of sexual selection on nonsexual fitness is controversial. On one side, elaborate display traits and preferences for them can be costly, reducing the nonsexual fitness of individuals possessing them, as well as their offspring. In contrast, sexual selection may reinforce nonsexual fitness if an individual's attractiveness and quality are genetically correlated. According to recen...

Since early 1998, the European Telematics project MATE has worked towards facilitating re-use of annotated spoken language data, addressing theoretical issues and implementing practical solutions which could serve as standards in the field. The resulting MATE Workbench for corpus annotation is now available as licensed open source software. This paper describes the MATE markup framework which b...

Evolution is affected by survival of individuals and by mate choice, but how sexual selection affects adaptation remains unclear. A new study finds that sexual selection can limit adaptation by causing male-induced harm to females and thus opposing natural selection.