Mauricio González-Forero

• University of St Andrews

Behaviour can be influenced by genes, environment, and developmental history, but quantifying these effects in humans and over our evolutionary past is challenging. Here we use a mathematical model that mechanistically recovers major aspects of human development and evolution to compute the causal effects on adult energy extraction skill (e.g., at...

Why the human brain size evolved has been a major evolutionary puzzle since Darwin but addressing it has been challenging. A key reason is the lack of research tools to infer the causes of a unique event for which experiments are not possible. We describe how the analogous problem of why there is day and night has been successfully addressed in phy...

Brain size tripled in the human lineage over four million years, but why this occurred remains uncertain. Here, to study what caused this brain expansion, I mathematically model the evolutionary and developmental (evo-devo) dynamics of hominin brain size. The model recovers (1) the evolution of brain and body sizes of seven hominin species starting...

Brain size tripled in the human lineage over four million years, but why this occurred remains uncertain. To advance our understanding of what caused human-brain expansion, we mechanistically replicate it in-silico by modelling the evolutionary and developmental (evo-devo) dynamics of human-brain size. We show that, starting from australopithecine...

Natural selection acts on developmentally constructed phenotypes, but how does development affect evolution? This question prompts a simultaneous consideration of development and evolution. However, there has been a lack of general mathematical frameworks mechanistically integrating the two, which may have inhibited progress on the question. Here,...

Eusociality, where largely unreproductive offspring help their mothers reproduce, is a major form of social organization. An increasingly documented feature of eusociality is that mothers induce their offspring to help by means of hormones, pheromones or behavioural displays, with evidence often indicating that offspring help voluntarily. The co-oc...

The human brain is unusually large. It has tripled in size from Australopithecines to modern humans¹ and has become almost six times larger than expected for a placental mammal of human size². Brains incur high metabolic costs³ and accordingly a long-standing question is why the large human brain has evolved⁴. The leading hypotheses propose benefit...

Appendix. Analytical results, parameter estimation, numerical implementation, and supplementary numerical results. (PDF)

Computer code. MATLAB computer code for solutions using GPOPS. (ZIP)

Mathematical modeling of brain evolution is scarce, possibly due in part to the difficulty of describing how brain relates to fitness. Yet such modeling is needed to formalize verbal arguments and deepen our understanding of brain evolution. To address this issue, we combine elements of life history and metabolic theories to formulate a metabolical...

In many eusocial species, queens use pheromones to influence offspring to express worker phenotypes. Although evidence suggests that queen pheromones are honest signals of the queen's reproductive health, here I show that queen's honest signalling can result from ancestral maternal manipulation. I develop a mathematical model to study the coevoluti...

Individuals can manipulate the behavior of social partners. However, manipulation may conflict with the fitness interests of the manipulated individuals. Manipulated individuals can then be favored to resist manipulation, possibly reducing or eliminating the manipulated behavior in the long run. I use a mathematical model to show that conflicts whe...

Abstract Many social behaviors are triggered by social partners. For example, cells in a multicellular organism often become soma via extrinsically regulated differentiation, while individuals in a eusocial colony often become helpers via extrinsic caste determination. One explanation for social triggering is that it informs when it is beneficial t...

The biological species concept (BSC) is a common way to define species although it is ambiguous even when strictly applied. I interpret it here syntactically in four different ways and show that one of them is more suitable than previously thought. The first interpretation (fully restricted) produces discrete, non-overlapping biological species wit...