Sexual Conflict and Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs): Coevolution of Sexually Antagonistic Host Traits with an STI
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In many taxa, there is a conflict between the sexes over mating rate. The outcome of sexually antagonistic coevolution depends on the costs of mating and natural selection against sexually antagonistic traits. A sexually transmitted infection (STI) changes the relative strength of these costs. We study the three-way evolutionary interaction among male persistence, female resistance, and STI virulence for two types of STIs: a viability-reducing STI and a reproduction-reducing STI. A viability-reducing STI escalates conflict between the sexes. This leads to increased STI virulence (i.e., full coevolution) if the costs of sexually antagonistic traits occur through viability but not through reproduction. In contrast, a reproduction-reducing STI de-escalates the sexual conflict, but STI virulence does not coevolve in response. We also investigated the establishment probability of STIs under different combinations of evolvability. Successful invasion by a viability-reducing STI becomes less likely if hosts (but not parasites) are evolvable, especially if only the female trait can evolve. A reproduction-reducing STI can almost always invade because it does not kill its host. We discuss how the evolution of host and parasite traits in a system with sexual conflict differs from a system with female mate choice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".