scholarly journals Meta-population structure and the evolutionary transition to multicellularity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline J. Rose ◽  
Katrin Hammerschmidt ◽  
Yuiry Pichugin ◽  
Paul B Rainey

AbstractThe evolutionary transition to multicellularity has occurred on numerous occasions, but transitions to complex life forms are rare. While the reasons are unclear, relevant factors include the intensity of within-versus between-group selection that are likely to have shaped the course of life cycle evolution. A highly structured environment eliminates the possibility of mixing between evolving lineages, thus ensuring strong competition between groups. Less structure intensifies competition within groups, decreasing opportunity for group-level evolution. Here, using populations of the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens, we report the results of experiments that explore the effect of lineage mixing on the evolution of nascent multicellular groups. Groups were propagated under regimes requiring reproduction via a life cycle replete with developmental and dispersal (propagule) phases, but in one treatment lineages never mixed, whereas in a second treatment, cells from different lineages experienced intense competition during the dispersal phase. The latter treatment favoured traits promoting cell growth at the expense of traits underlying group fitness – a finding that is supported by results from a mathematical model. Together our results show that the transition to multicellularity benefits from ecological conditions that maintain discreteness not just of the group (soma) phase, but also of the dispersal (germline) phase.

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Saman Esmaeilian ◽  
Dariush Mohamadi ◽  
Majid Esmaelian ◽  
Mostafa Ebrahimpour

Purpose This paper aims to minimize the total carbon emissions and costs and also maximize the total social benefits. Design/methodology/approach The present study develops a mathematical model for a closed-loop supply chain network of perishable products so that considers the vital aspects of sustainability across the life cycle of the supply chain network. To evaluate carbon emissions, two different regulating policies are studied. Findings According to the obtained results, increasing the lifetime of the perishable products improves the incorporated objective function (IOF) in both the carbon cap-and-trade model and the model with a strict cap on carbon emission while the solving time increases in both models. Moreover, the computational efficiency of the carbon cap-and-trade model is higher than that of the model with a strict cap, but its value of the IOF is worse. Results indicate that efficient policies for carbon management will support planners to achieve sustainability in a cost-effectively manner. Originality/value This research proposes a mathematical model for the sustainable closed-loop supply chain of perishable products that applies the significant aspects of sustainability across the life cycle of the supply chain network. Regional economic value, regional development, unemployment rate and the number of job opportunities created in the regions are considered as the social dimension.


2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (33-34) ◽  
pp. 2081-2094 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ghasem M. Kashani ◽  
Alireza Sari ◽  
Shidokht Hosseinie ◽  
Masoumeh Malek ◽  
Ehsan Entezari

Author(s):  
Jan A. Pechenik

I have a Hardin cartoon on my office door. It shows a series of animals thinking about the meaning of life. In sequence, we see a lobe-finned fish, a salamander, a lizard, and a monkey, all thinking, “Eat, survive, reproduce; eat, survive, reproduce.” Then comes man: “What's it all about?” he wonders. Organisms live to reproduce. The ultimate selective pressure on any organism is to survive long enough and well enough to pass genetic material to a next generation that will also be successful in reproducing. In this sense, then, every morphological, physiological, biochemical, or behavioral adaptation contributes to reproductive success, making the field of life cycle evolution a very broad one indeed. Key components include mode of sexuality, age and size at first reproduction (Roff, this volume), number of reproductive episodes in a lifetime, offspring size (Messina and Fox, this volume), fecundity, the extent to which parents protect their offspring and how that protection is achieved, source of nutrition during development, survival to maturity, the consequences of shifts in any of these components, and the underlying mechanisms responsible for such shifts. Many of these issues are dealt with in other chapters. Here I focus exclusively on animals, and on a particularly widespread sort of life cycle that includes at least two ecologically distinct free-living stages. Such “complex life cycles” (Istock 1967) are especially common among amphibians and fishes (Hall and Wake 1999), and within most invertebrate groups, including insects (Gilbert and Frieden 1981), crustaceans, bivalves, gastropods, polychaete worms, echinoderms, bryozoans, and corals and other cnidarians (Thorson 1950). In such life cycles, the juvenile or adult stage is reached by metamorphosing from a preceding, free-living larval stage. In many species, metamorphosis involves a veritable revolution in morphology, ecology, behavior, and physiology, sometimes taking place in as little as a few minutes or a few hours. In addition to the issues already mentioned, key components of such complex life cycles include the timing of metamorphosis (i.e., when it occurs), the size at which larvae metamorphose, and the consequences of metamorphosing at particular times or at particular sizes. The potential advantages of including larval stages in the life history have been much discussed.


Author(s):  
Jinju Kim ◽  
Harrison Kim

AbstractShort-life cycle products are frequently replaced and discarded despite being resource-intensive. The short life span and the low utilization rate of the end-of-life products cause severe environmental problems and waste of resources. In the case of short-life cycle products, a new generation of products is released sooner than other products, therefore there are the opportunities to have various generations of products during the remanufacturing process. The commonality between generations increases the intergenerational component compatibility, which increases the efficiency of the manufacturing and remanufacturing processes, while at the same time weakening the performance difference between generations. This paper proposes a mathematical model to investigate the effect of commonality among generations on the overall production process. Based on various given new generation product designs with different commonality, we aim to propose optimal production planning and pricing strategies to maximize the total profitability and investigate how the results vary according to the commonality strategies between product generations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 375 (1797) ◽  
pp. 20190364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah E. Shelton ◽  
Richard E. Michod

The Price equation embodies the ‘conditions approach’ to evolution in which the Darwinian conditions of heritable variation in fitness are represented in equation form. The equation can be applied recursively, leading to a partition of selection at the group and individual levels. After reviewing the well-known issues with the Price partition, as well as issues with a partition based on contextual analysis, we summarize a partition of group and individual selection based on counterfactual fitness, the fitness that grouped cells would have were they solitary. To understand ‘group selection’ in multi-level selection models, we assume that only group selection can make cells suboptimal when they are removed from the group. Our analyses suggest that there are at least three kinds of selection that can be occurring at the same time: group-specific selection along with two kinds of individual selection, within-group selection and global individual selection. Analyses based on counterfactual fitness allow us to specify how close a group is to being a pseudo-group, and this can be a basis for quantifying progression through an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI). During an ETI, fitnesses at the two levels, group and individual, become decoupled, in the sense that fitness in a group may be quite high, even as counterfactual fitness goes to zero. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Fifty years of the Price equation’.


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