One theory of why some pathogens are virulent (i.e. they damage their host) is that they need to extract resources from their host in order to compete for transmission to new hosts, and resource extraction can damage the host. Here we describe our studies in malaria that test this idea. We go on to show that host immunity can exacerbate selection for virulence and therefore that vaccines that r...

This paper develops a payoff equivalence theorem for mechanisms with ambiguity averse participants with preferences of the Maxmin Expected Utility (MEU) form (Gilboa and Schmeidler [8]). We use our payoff equivalence result to explicitly characterize the revenue maximizing private value auction mechanism for agents with arbitrary forms of ambiguous beliefs. We also show that the revenue ranking...

Abstract Nouns and verbs are known to differ in the types of grammatical information they encode. What is less well relationship between verbal nominal coding within across languages. The equi-complexity hypothesis holds that all languages equally complex overall, which entails trade-offs different domains. From a diachronic point view, this implies loss gain domains can be expected balance eac...

The negative co-variation of life-history traits such as fecundity and lifespan across species suggests the existence of ubiquitous trade-offs. Mechanistically, trade-offs result from the need to differentially allocate limited resources to traits like reproduction versus self-maintenance, with selection favoring the evolution of optimal allocation mechanism. Here I discuss the physiological (e...

Analysis of senescent Escherichia coli cells reveals a link between protein oxidation and the fidelity of the translational apparatus. This model system has also provided a mechanistic molecular explanation for a trade-off between reproduction and survival activities, which may inspire proponents of the disposable soma theory and antagonistic pleiotropy hypothesis of aging.