Of mice, mothers and mirror-images, testing relationships between asymmetry and fecundity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The study of subtle deviations from perfect bilateral symmetry (fluctuating asymmetry) has been proposed a means of easily quantifying fitness at both the individual and the population levels of biological organization. Its application in the fields of conservation and evolutionary biology is controversial, as empirical tests of the hypothesized correlations among asymmetry, stress and fitness have yielded inconsistent results. I tested whether mandibular asymmetry correlated with female fecundity (at the individual level) and/or Malthusian fitness (at the population level) in deer mice, 'Peromyscus maniculatus gracilis' (Le Conte) obtained from a 21-year study in Algonquin Park, Ontario. At the individual level, asymmetry was a poor predictor of litter size or body size. At the population level, however, the amount of asymmetry in the breeding population was strongly related to variation in environmental conditions. I propose a hypothesis to explain these observations that incorporates mouse reproductive physiology and ecology.
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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 | 0.002 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".