A cryptic rock‐paper‐scissors game between <i><scp>D</scp>rosophila</i> males
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Explaining the maintenance of genetic variation in characters associated with Darwinian fitness is a preoccupation of evolutionary biologists. Spatial or temporal variation in the environment can certainly promote polymorphism, yet even populations of 'model organisms', like fruit flies, kept on invariant protocols for hundreds of generations in the laboratory often show fitness variation that exceeds what would be expected from the input of new mutations alone. Such observations suggest either complexities of selection or of genetic architecture, and offer a powerful tool for the study of mechanisms that promote stable polymorphism. In this issue of Molecular Ecology, Zhang et al. (2013) report examples of nontransitivity in the outcome of postcopulatory sexual selection in the fruit fly, Drosophila, that follow the rules of the popular stalemate-breaking game roshambo - or rock, paper, scissors (RPS). The important feature of RPS is that while each strategy beats one other, it in turn is beaten by the third. Using chromosome extraction lines, the authors confirm earlier findings that the outcome of postcopulatory sexual selection via sperm competition for a male depends, in part, upon the competitor male's genotype. But taking it one step further, they demonstrate the nontransitivities between males required for circular RPS cycles in sperm competition between males, and are able to identify at least four associated loci. Because the postmating phenotype involves hundreds of potentially interacting peptides and receptors, this is an important step to understanding the persistence of variation in a critical component of male fitness.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".