The evolution of infertility: does hatching rate in birds coevolve with female polyandry?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Natural levels of infertility in many taxa are often remarkably high, amounting to a considerable fitness cost which one expects to be minimized by natural selection. Several mechanisms have been proposed as potential causes of infertility, including inbreeding depression, genetic incompatibilities and selfish genetic elements. Infertility may also be an inherent result of conflict over fertilization between the sexes in polyandrous species, either because too many sperm enter the egg or because of over-efficient barriers to such polyspermic fertilizations. We generated phylogenetic independent contrasts to examine the variation in hatching success for a maximum of 58 species of birds in relation to two measures of female polyandry. Hatching success varied enormously across species (range: 61–100%), with a mean of 12% of eggs failing to hatch, but was not related to either the rate of extrapair paternity or to relative testes size. Thus, the causes of this significant fitness cost remains unclear and merits further examination by evolutionary biologists.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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".