2010/08/25 by Jeremy Van Cleve, Marcus W. Feldman, Marcus W. Feldman +1 · 38 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Affect (linguistics) #Biological dispersal #Biology #DNA methylation #Demographic history #Demography #Evolution and Genetic Dynamics #Evolutionary biology #Gene #Genealogy #Genetic Syndromes and Imprinting #Genetic diversity and population structure #Genetic variation #Genetics #Genomic imprinting #History #Imprinting (psychology) #Kinship #Life history theory #Population #Sociology
paper · open access · doi:10.1086/656277
published in The American Naturalist 176(4), 440-455 (University of Chicago Press)
openalex publication_date 2010/08/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
How phenomena like helping, dispersal, or the sex ratio evolve depends critically on demographic and life-history factors. One phenotype that is of particular interest to biologists is genomic imprinting, which results in parent-of-origin-specific gene expression and thus deviates from the predictions of Mendel's rules. The most prominent explanation for the evolution of genomic imprinting, the kinship theory, originally specified that multiple paternity can cause the evolution of imprinting when offspring affect maternal resource provisioning. Most models of the kinship theory do not detail how population subdivision, demography, and life history affect the evolution of imprinting. In this work, we embed the classic kinship theory within an island model of population structure and allow for diverse demographic and life-history features to affect the direction of selection on imprinting. We find that population structure does not change how multiple paternity affects the evolution of imprinting under the classic kinship theory. However, if the degree of multiple paternity is not too large, we find that sex-specific migration and survival and generation overlap are the primary factors determining which allele is silenced. This indicates that imprinting can evolve purely as a result of sex-related asymmetries in the demographic structure or life history of a species.