Parental divorce is associated with a number of emotional and behavioral problems in young-adult offspring, but theoretical and empirical considerations suggest that the relation may be partially or fully accounted for by passive gene–environment correlation or environmental selection characteristics. The current study used the Children of Twins Design to explore whether shared environmental or...

Numerous experimental studies suggest that oxidative stress contributes to the pathophysiology of hypertension and, importantly, that oxidative stress plays a more definitive role in mediating hypertension in males than in females. Intrauterine growth restriction induced by reduced uterine perfusion initiated at day 14 of gestation in the rat programs hypertension in adult male growth-restricte...

Variation in the early environment has the potential to permanently alter offspring behavior and development. We have previously shown that naturally occurring variation in biparental care of offspring in the prairie vole is related to differences in social behavior of the offspring. It was not, however, clear whether the behavioral differences seen between offspring receiving high compared to ...

BACKGROUND There is abundant evidence that offspring of depressed mothers are at increased risk for persistent behavior problems related to emotion regulation, but the mechanisms by which offspring incur this risk are not entirely clear. Early adverse caregiving experiences have been associated with structural alterations in the amygdala and hippocampus, which parallel findings of cortical regi...

where {ξ(k, j) : k, j = 1, 2, · · · } and {η(k) : k = 1, 2, · · · } are two independent families of i.i.d. random variables taking values in N := {0, 1, 2, · · · }. The distribution of ξ(k, j) is called the offspring distribution and the distribution of η(k) is called the immigration distribution. Let g(·) and h(·) be the generating functions of ξ(k, j) and η(k), respectively. It is easy to see...

Explaining the maintenance of sexual reproduction remains one of the greatest challenges in biology. The theoretical oddity of sex is based on at least three advantages that asexual organisms have over sexual ones: 1Asexuals, by not producing males, have a two fold advantage over sexuals, regarding the number of reproductive individuals; 2Sexuals have an evolutionary disadvantage over asexuals,...

The crossover operator is the most innovative and relevant operator in realcoded genetic algorithms. In this work we propose a new strategy to improve the performance of this operator by the creation of virtual parents obtained from the population parameters of localisation and dispersion of the best individuals. The idea consists of mating these virtual parents with individuals of the populati...

In this paper we consider Markov processes in which the state at time t is & : Zd + (0, 1,2}. We think of 0 = grass, 1 = bushes, and 2 = trees, and formulate the evolution as follows: (i) l’s and 2’s each die (i.e. become 0) at rate 1. (ii) l’s (resp. 2’s) give birth at rate A, (resp. A,). (iii) If the birth occurs at x the offspring is sent to a site chosen at random from {y: y -x E X}, K = th...

L-systems are extremely simple algorithms: Visualize a turtle moving a distance d straight forward. At the end of its journey it produces two offspring, one branching of slightly to the left and the second branching off slightly to the right, and both traveling a 10% shorter distance. Once the offspring reach their destination each creates two offspring which branch off slightly to the left and...

This work introduces a new evolutionary algorithm that adapts the operator probabilities (rates) while evolves the solution of the problem. Each individual encodes its genetic rates. In every generation, each individual is modified by only one operator that is selected according to the encoded rates. Such rates are updated according to the performance achieved by the offspring (compared to its ...