Franz J Weissing

University of Groningen | RUG · Theoretical Biology Group

Significance We report on a two-step decision-making experiment. The first part shows that humans differ consistently in the way they learn from others. Some individuals are success-based learners, who try to identify successful peers and mimic their behavior. Others are frequency-based learners, who tend to adopt the most frequent behavior in thei...

Personality differences are a widespread phenomenon throughout the animal kingdom. Past research has focused on the characterization of such differences and a quest for their proximate and ultimate causation. However, the consequences of these differences for ecology and evolution received much less attention. Here, we strive to fill this gap by pr...

Ecological theory predicts that animal movement is shaped by its efficiency of resource acquisition. Focusing solely on efficiency, however, ignores the fact that animal activity can affect resource availability and distribution. Here, we show that feedback between individual behavior and environmental complexity can explain movement strategies in...

Ecological speciation is considered an adaptive response to selection for local adaptation. However, besides suitable ecological conditions, the process requires assortative mating to protect the nascent species from homogenization by gene flow. By means of a simple model, we demonstrate that disruptive ecological selection favors the evolution of...

In recent years evidence has been accumulating that personalities are not only found in humans but also in a wide range of other animal species. Individuals differ consistently in their behavioural tendencies and the behaviour in one context is correlated with the behaviour in multiple other contexts. From an adaptive perspective, the evolution of...

Oncolytic virotherapy is a promising form of cancer treatment that uses viruses to infect and kill cancer cells. In addition to their direct effects on cancer cells, the viruses stimulate various immune responses partly directed against the tumour. Efforts are made to genetically engineer oncolytic viruses to enhance their immunogenic potential. Ho...

The evolution of parental cooperation is challenging to explain because caring for offspring is costly, and parents face an evolutionary conflict of interests over how much care each should contribute. Evolutionary game theory suggests that this conflict may be resolved through parental negotiation, where the parents make their care level dependent...

Learning from others is an important adaptation. However, the evolution of social learning and its role in the spread of socially transmitted information are not well understood. Few models of social learning account for the fact that socially transmitted information must be reconstructed by the learner, based on the learner's previous knowledge an...

Delayed offspring dispersal is an important aspect of the evolution of cooperative breeding. Applying a path-analysis approach to the long-term Seychelles warbler (Acrocephalus sechellensis) dataset, we studied whether and how delayed dispersal is affected by territory quality, the presence of helpers and non-helping subordinates, maternal breeding...

Objectives Environmental conditions can influence mutation rates in bacteria. Fever is a common response to infection that alters the growth conditions of infecting bacteria. Here we examine how a temperature change, such as is associated with fever, affects the mutation rate towards antibiotic resistance. Methods We used a fluctuation test to ass...

Plasticity is found in all domains of life and is particularly relevant when populations experience variable environmental conditions. Traditionally, evolutionary models of plasticity are non-mechanistic: they typically view reactions norms as the target of selection, without considering the underlying genetics explicitly. Consequently, there have...

Learning from past experience is an important adaptation and theoretical models may help to understand its evolution. Many of the existing models study simple phenotypes and do not consider the mechanisms underlying learning while the more complex neural network models often make biologically unrealistic assumptions and rarely consider evolutionary...

Humans readily cooperate, even with strangers and without prospects of reciprocation. Despite thousands of studies, this finding is not well understood. Most studies focussed on a single aspect of cooperation and were conducted under anonymous conditions. However, cooperation is a multi-faceted phenomenon, involving generosity, readiness to share,...

The parental roles of males and females differ considerably between and within species. By means of individual-based evolutionary simulations, we strive to explain this diversity. We show that the conflict between the sexes creates a sex bias (towards maternal or paternal care), even if the two sexes are initially identical. When including sexual s...

The Anopheles mosquito is one of thousands of species in which sex differences play a central part in their biology, as only females need a blood meal to produce eggs. Sex differentiation is regulated by sex chromosomes, but their presence creates a dosage imbalance between males (XY) and females (XX). Dosage compensation (DC) can re-equilibrate th...

Madole & Harden argue that the Mendelian reshuffling of genes and genomes is analogous to randomised controlled trials. We are not convinced by their arguments. First, their recipe for meeting the demands on randomised experiments is inherently inconsistent. Second, disequilibrium across chromosomes conflicts with their assumption of statistical in...

The ability to learn from past experience is an important adaptation, but how natural selection shapes learning is not well understood. Here, we present a novel way of modelling learning using small neural networks and a simple, biology-inspired learning algorithm. Learning affects only part of the network, and it is governed by the difference betw...

Animal sociality emerges from individual decisions on how to balance the costs and benefits of being sociable. Novel pathogens introduced into wildlife populations should increase the costs of sociality, selecting against gregariousness. Using an individual-based model that captures essential features of pathogen transmission among social hosts, we...

The ability to learn from past experience is an important adaptation, but how natural selection shapes learning is not well understood. Here, we investigate the evolution of associative learning (the association of stimuli with rewards) by a modelling approach that is based on the evolution of neural networks (NNs) underlying learning. Individuals...

Quantifying fitness is important to understand adaptive evolution. Reproductive values are useful for making fitness comparisons involving different categories of individuals, like males and females. By definition, the reproductive value of a category is the expected per capita contribution of the members of that category to the gene pool of future...

Parental care patterns differ enormously among and even within species. This is exemplified by Chinese penduline tits Remiz consobrinus, where biparental care, female‐only care, male‐only care and biparental desertion all occur in the same population; moreover, the distribution of these care patterns differs systematically between populations. The...

Competition typically takes place in a spatial context, but eco-evolutionary models rarely address the joint evolution of movement and competition strategies. Here we investigate a spatially explicit forager-kleptoparasite model where consumers can either forage on a heterogeneous resource landscape or steal resource items from conspecifics (klepto...

Habitat fragmentation can have negative impacts on migratory organisms that rely on the functional connectivity between growing and breeding grounds. Quantifying the population-level phenotypic consequences of such fragmentation requires fine-scaled tracking of individual behaviour and movements across relevant scales. Here we make use of a natural...

The ability to trust others, including strangers, is a prerequisite for human cooperation. Economically it is not rational to trust strangers, as trust can be easily exploited. Still, generally, the level of trust toward strangers is relatively high. Trust is closely related to trustworthiness: when trusting others, one expects them to reciprocate....

Oncolytic virotherapy is a promising form of cancer treatment that uses native or genetically engineered viruses to target, infect and kill cancer cells. Unfortunately, this form of therapy is not effective in a substantial proportion of cancer patients, partly due to the occurrence of infection-resistant tumour cells. To shed new light on the mech...

Parental care is one of the most diverse social behaviours, and caring by the male, female or both parents is essential for successful reproduction of many organisms. Theoretical and empirical studies suggest that parental sex roles are associated with biased sex ratios. However, there is considerable debate on the causal relationship between paren...

Division of labour occurs in a broad range of organisms. Yet, how division of labour can emerge in the absence of pre-existing interindividual differences is poorly understood. Using a simple but realistic model, we show that in a group of initially identical individuals, division of labour emerges spontaneously if returning foragers share part of...

Converging lines of inquiry from across the social and biological sciences target the adult sex ratio (ASR; the proportion of males in the adult population) as a fundamental population-level determinant of behavior. The ASR, which indicates the relative number of potential mates to competitors in a population, frames the selective arena for competi...

Background Oncolytic virotherapy is a promising form of cancer treatment that uses native or genetically engineered viruses to target, infect and kill cancer cells. Unfortunately, this form of therapy is not effective in a substantial proportion of cancer patients, partly due to the occurrence of infection-resistant tumor cells. Materials and Meth...

The frequency and asymmetry of mixed-species mating set the initial stage for the ecological and evolutionary implications of hybridization. How such patterns of mixed-species mating, in turn, are influenced by the combination of mate choice errors and relative species abundance remains largely unknown. We develop a mathematical model that generate...

In animals, species differ remarkably in parental care strategies. For instance, male-only care is prevalent in teleost fishes, while biparental care predominates in birds and female-only care is widespread in mammals. Understanding the origin and maintenance of diversified parental care systems is a key challenge in evolutionary ecology. It has be...

Ideal free distribution theory attempts to predict the distribution of well-informed (‘ideal’) and unconstrained (‘free’) foragers in space based on adaptive individual decisions. When individuals differ in competitive ability, a whole array of equilibrium distributions is possible, and it is unclear which of these distributions are most likely. In...

In the 1970s, water management in the Netherlands resulted in numerous isolated populations of three-spined sticklebacks, which can no longer migrate from freshwater to the sea. We tested whether ∼50 years of isolation resulted in reduced migratory tendencies in these ‘resident’ sticklebacks. Lab-based individual testing showed behavioural divergen...

The ability to trust other individuals, including strangers, is a prerequisite for human cooperation. Economically it is not rational to trust others, as trust can be easily exploited. Still, generally the level of trust toward strangers is relatively high. Trust is closely related to trustworthiness: when trusting others, one expects them to recip...

Division of labour occurs in a broad range of organisms. Yet, how division of labour can emerge in the absence of pre-existing interindividual differences is poorly understood. Using a simple but realistic model, we show that in a group of initially identical individuals, division of labour emerges spontaneously if returning foragers share part of...

Oncolytic virotherapy is a promising form of cancer treatment that uses native or genetically engineered viruses to target, infect and kill cancer cells. Unfortunately, this form of therapy is not effective in a substantial proportion of cancer patients, partly due to the occurrence of infectionresistant tumor cells. To shed new light on the mechan...

Animal social interactions are the outcomes of evolved strategies that integrate the costs and benefits of being sociable. Using a novel mechanistic, evolutionary, individual-based simulation model, we examine how animals balance the risk of pathogen transmission against the benefits of social information about resource patches, and how this determ...

Quantifying fitness is important to understand adaptive evolution. Reproductive values are useful for making fitness comparisons involving different categories of individuals, like males and females. By definition, the reproductive value of a category is the expected per capita contribution of the members of that category to the gene pool of future...

The coevolution of predators and prey has been the subject of much empirical and theoretical research that produced intriguing insights into the interplay of ecology and evolution. To allow for mathematical analysis, models of predator–prey coevolution are often coarse-grained, focussing on population-level processes and largely neglecting individu...

‘Evolvability’ – the ability to undergo adaptive evolution – is a key concept for understanding and predicting the response of biological systems to environmental change. Evolvability has various facets and is applied in many ways, easily leading to misunderstandings among researchers. To clarify matters, we first categorize the mechanisms and orga...

Even in well-studied organisms, it is often challenging to uncover the social and environmental determinants of fitness. Typically, fitness is determined by a variety of factors that act in concert, thus forming complex networks of causal relationships. Moreover, even strong correlations between social and environmental conditions and fitness compo...

Water management measures in the 1970s in the Netherlands have produced a large number of “resident” populations of three-spined sticklebacks that are no longer able to migrate to the sea. This may be viewed as a replicated field experiment, allowing us to study how the resident populations are coping with human-induced barriers to migration. We ha...

The adaptive capacity of many organisms is seriously challenged by human-imposed environmental change, which currently happens at unprecedented rates and magnitudes. For migratory fish, habitat fragmentation is a major challenge that can compromise their survival and reproduction. Therefore, it is important to study if fish populations can adapt to...

The emergence and maintenance of cooperation is a popular topic in studies of information sciences and evolutionary game theory. In two-player iterated games, memory in terms of the outcome of previous interactions and the strategy choices of co-players are of great referential significance for subsequent strategy actions. It is generally recognize...

Water management measures in the 1970s in the Netherlands have produced a large number of ‘resident’ populations of three-spined sticklebacks that are no longer able to migrate to the sea. This may be viewed as a replicated field experiment, allowing us to study how the resident populations are coping with human-induced barriers to migration. We ha...

The adaptive capacity of many organisms is seriously challenged by human-imposed environmental change, which currently happens at unprecedented rates and magnitudes. For migratory fish, habitat fragmentation is a major challenge that can compromise their survival and reproduction. Therefore, it is important to study if fish populations can adapt to...

Competition typically takes place in a spatial context, but eco-evolutionary models rarely address the joint evolution of movement and competition strategies. Here we investigate a spatially explicit producer-scrounger model where consumers can either forage on a heterogeneous resource landscape or steal resource items from conspecifics (kleptopara...

Cultural evolution theory has long been inspired by evolutionary biology. Conceptual analogies between biological and cultural evolution have led to the adoption of a range of formal theoretical approaches from population dynamics and genetics. However, this has resulted in a research programme with a strong focus on cultural transmission. Here, we...

Numerous cases of evolutionary trait loss and regain have been reported over the years. Here, we argue that such reverse evolution can also become apparent when trait expression is plastic in response to the environment. We tested this idea for the loss and regain of fat synthesis in parasitic wasps. We first show experimentally that the wasp Lepto...

In animals, species differ remarkably in parental care strategies. For instance, male-only care is prevalent in teleost fishes, while biparental care predominates in birds and female-only care is widespread in mammals. Understanding the origin and maintenance of diversified parental care systems is a key challenge in evolutionary ecology. It has be...

The coevolution of predators and prey has been the subject of much empirical and theoretical research, which has produced intriguing insights into the intricacies of eco-evolutionary dynamics. Mechanistically detailed models are rare, however, because the simultaneous consideration of individual-level behaviour (on which natural selection is acting...

In many animal species, parents provide care for their offspring, but the parental roles of the two sexes differ considerably between and within species. Here, we use an individual-based simulation approach to investigate the evolutionary emergence and stability of parental roles. Our conclusions are in striking contrast to the results of analytica...

Understanding the evolutionary and ecological roles of 'non-genetic' inheritance (NGI) is daunting due to the complexity and diversity of epigenetic mechanisms. We draw on insights from molecular and evolutionary biology perspectives to identify three general features of 'non-genetic' inheritance systems: (i) they are functionally interdependent wi...

We report on an experimental study that was set up to reveal differences in the tendencies of men and women to cooperate in same-sex interactions. Former studies on this subject were mostly conducted in industrialized modern societies. In contrast, we tested the cooperation tendency among Buryats, a people from Southern Siberia of Mongolian origin....

Cultural evolution theory has long been inspired by evolutionary biology. Conceptual analogies between biological and cultural evolution have led to the adoption of a range of formal theoretical approaches from population dynamics and genetics. However, this has resulted in a research programme with a strong focus on cultural transmission. Here, we...

The transition from solitary life to sociality is considered one of the major transitions in evolution. In primates, this transition is currently not well understood. Traditional verbal models appear insufficient to unravel the complex interplay of environmental and demographic factors involved in the evolution of primate sociality, and recent phyl...

Dollo's law of irreversibility states that once a complex adaptation has been lost in evolution, it will not be regained. Recently, various violations of this principle have been described. Here, we argue that the logic underlying Dollo's law only applies to traits that are constitutively expressed, while it fails in case of 'plastic' traits that a...

Understanding the evolutionary and ecological roles of 'non-genetic' inheritance is daunting due to the complexity and diversity of epigenetic mechanisms. We draw on precise insights from molecular structures and events to identify three general features of 'non-genetic' inheritance systems that are central to broader investigations: (i) they are f...

Cooperation, ubiquitous in nature, is difficult to explain from an evolutionary perspective. Many modeling studies strive to resolve this challenge, but their simplifying assumptions on population and interaction structure are rarely met in ecological settings. Here we use a modeling approach that includes more ecological detail to investigate evol...

Gregor Mendel’s crossing experiments in pea are the foundation of classical genetics, but since the importance of his 1866 paper was not understood until after long after his notebooks were burned, we know little... Despite the fact that Gregor Mendel is generally respected as the founder of genetics, little is known about the origin of and motivat...