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Social Selection and the Evolution of Maladaptation

View ORCID ProfileJoel W. McGlothlin, View ORCID ProfileDavid N. Fisher
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.12.435141
Joel W. McGlothlin
1Department of Biological Sciences, Virginia Tech, Derring Hall Room 2125, 926 West Campus Drive (MC 0406), Blacksburg, VA 24061 (McGlothlin, e-mail: )
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  • For correspondence: joelmcg@vt.edu joelmcg@vt.edu
David N. Fisher
2School of Biological Sciences, University of Aberdeen, King’s College, Aberdeen, United Kingdom AB24 3FX (Fisher, e-mail: )
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  • For correspondence: david.fisher@abdn.ac.uk
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Abstract

Evolution by natural selection is often viewed as a process that inevitably leads to adaptation, or an increase in population fitness over time. However, maladaptation, an evolved decrease in fitness, may also occur in response to natural selection under some conditions. Social effects on fitness (or social selection) have been identified as a potential cause of maladaptation, but we lack a general rule identifying when social selection should lead to a decrease in population mean fitness. Here we use a quantitative genetic model to develop such a rule. We show that maladaptation is most likely to occur when social selection is strong relative to the nonsocial component of selection and acts in an opposing direction. In this scenario, evolutionary increases in traits that impose fitness costs on others may outweigh evolved gains in fitness for the individual, leading to a net decrease in population mean fitness. Further, we find maladaptation may also sometimes occur when phenotypes of interacting individuals negatively covary. We outline the biological situations where maladaptation in response to social selection can be expected, provide both quantitative genetic and phenotypic versions of our derived result, and suggest what empirical work would be needed to test it. We also consider the effect of social selection on inclusive fitness and support previous work showing that inclusive fitness cannot suffer an evolutionary decrease. Taken together, our results show that social selection may decrease population mean fitness when it opposes individual-level selection, even as inclusive fitness increases.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted March 12, 2021.
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Social Selection and the Evolution of Maladaptation
Joel W. McGlothlin, David N. Fisher
bioRxiv 2021.03.12.435141; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.12.435141
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Social Selection and the Evolution of Maladaptation
Joel W. McGlothlin, David N. Fisher
bioRxiv 2021.03.12.435141; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.12.435141

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