Event:

Natural selection improves population fitness. Right? Well, actually, it is complicated. If individuals can gain an fitness advantage over conspecifics, traits can evolve despite making population performance poorer. I will discuss this with examples involving territorial competition as well as competition for matings, and then ask the audience to step ourside their comfort zone – in case the comfort zone contains the assumption that every organism has a mother and a father. Sexual conflict works quite differently if these assumptions are broken, and the journey to understand why this is the case is quite though-provoking.