Singing to impress: the importance of developmental stress
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It was the aim of our review (Spencer and MacDougall-Shackleton, this issue) not only to describe the evidence in favor of the developmental stress hypothesis (DSH) but also to place this hypothesis in what we believe to be an appropriate wider context of the evolution of other indicators of developmental stability. We are heartened by the many comments that agree with us with respect to our attempt to widen the influence of this hypothesis and drive future work. We also agree that it is becoming more evident from a large body of work that it is important to take developmental conditions into account when measuring the effects of environmental changes on adult performance, a difficult task when studying natural populations. Although there is a large body of empirical evidence in favor of the DSH, we highlight that there are several questions that still remain unanswered. Studies to date have merely focused on the long-term effects of developmental stress on song signal quality, and we currently do not know the relative importance of genes and environment in shaping signal quality during development (Buchanan et al. 2004). Kvarnemo (this issue) suggests that we assert it does not matter whether the resultant sexual signal is representative of “good genes” and an ability to cope well with stress or a lack of stress during development. In contrast, we feel that this is an important issue, merely one that is hard to disentangle empirically and that has received little attention in the past. It is hard to imagine a natural environment without any stressors at all, but developmental environments will differ in their “stressfulness” through a variety of different routes, such as parental provisioning or anthropogenic disturbance. Individuals are thus almost certain to vary in the level of stressors they experience and in their ability to cope with them. It thus remains unclear, in the developmental stress framework, whether song signals the indirect benefits of developmental stability, the potential direct benefits derived from a benign developmental history, or both. There has been a great debate within the realms of sexual selection research concerning the relative importance of both direct and indirect benefits in driving the evolution of exaggerated secondary sexual traits, and this is bound to continue. We are enthusiastic about the possibility of researchers in different areas taking up this challenge to further our knowledge of the interaction between genes and the environment in maintaining sexual signals and agree wholeheartedly that this is an area that requires further work (Kasumovic, this issue; Swaddle, this issue; Kvarnemo, this issue).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".