ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Male harm offsets the demographic benefits of good genes.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sexual Selection Associated With an Aggressive Male Phenotype Reduces Population Size and Hinders Population Recovery After Heat Stress.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Sexual selection and speciation: a meta-analysis of comparative studies.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- A simple plant-mycorrhizal fungal resource trade co-evolution model explains mutualism stability, extinction and transitory parasitism via fitness feedback.The New phytologist · 2025Article
- Carryover Effects on Reproduction Can Buffer Against Mortality-Driven Population Declines at Elevated Developmental Temperatures.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Temperature can reverse sexual conflict, facilitating population growth.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Ecology and sexual conflict drive the macroevolutionary dynamics of female-limited color polymorphisms in damselflies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Does sexual dimorphism reflect sexual antagonism? Covariation of female fitness with brothers' sexual traits and their female homologues in neriid flies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Fighting Through the Heat: How Male Aggression Influences Demography Under Recurrent Heatwaves.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Sexual selection, genomic evolution and population fitness inProceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Alternative reproductive tactics and evolutionary rescue.Evolution letters · 2024Article
- Pesticide exposure triggers sex-specific inter- and transgenerational effects conditioned by past sexual selection.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Sexually antagonistic coevolution of the male nuptial gift and female feeding behaviour in decorated crickets.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Increased male-induced harm in response to female-limited selection: interactive effects between intra- and interlocus sexual conflict?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Why high-condition males might be bad news for females and populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Sexual conflict can arise when males evolve traits that improve their mating success but in doing so harm females. By reducing female fitness, male harm can diminish offspring production in a population and even drive extinction. Current theory on harm is based on the assumption that an individual's phenotype is solely determined by its genotype. But the expression of most sexually selected traits is also influenced by variation in biological condition (condition-dependent expression), such that individuals in better condition can express more extreme phenotypes. Here, we developed demographically explicit models of sexual conflict evolution where individuals vary in their condition. Because condition-dependent expression readily evolves for traits underlying sexual conflict, we show that conflict is more intense in populations where individuals are in better condition. Such intensified conflict reduces mean fitness and can thus generate a negative association between condition and population size. The impact of condition on demography is especially likely to be detrimental when the genetic basis of condition coevolves with sexual conflict. This occurs because sexual selection favors alleles that improve condition (the so-called good genes effect), producing feedback between condition and sexual conflict that drives the evolution of intense male harm. Our results indicate that in presence of male harm, the good genes effect in fact easily becomes detrimental to populations.
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