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Costly signaling theory in evolutionary psychology refers to uses of costly signaling theory and adaptationism in explanations for psychological traits and states. Often informed by the closely related fields of human behavioral ecology and cultural evolution, such explanations are predominantly focused on humans and emphasize the benefits of altering the perceptions of others and the need to ...
Altruism, as observed in populations of organisms, is when an individual performs an action at a cost to itself (in terms of e.g. pleasure and quality of life, time, probability of survival or reproduction) that benefits, directly or indirectly, another individual, without the expectation of reciprocity or compensation for that action.
To construct an optimality model, the behavior must first be clearly defined. Then, descriptions of how the costs and benefits vary with the way the behavior is performed must be obtained. [1] Examples of benefits and costs include direct fitness measures like offspring produced, change in lifespan, time spent or gained, or energy spent and gained.
In life history theory, the cost of reproduction hypothesis is the idea that reproduction is costly in terms of future survival and reproduction. This is mediated by various mechanisms, with the two most prominent being hormonal regulation and differential allocation of internal resources.
In biology, the biological cost or metabolic price is a measure of the increased energy metabolism that is required to achieve a function. Drug resistance in microbiology, for instance, has a very high metabolic price, [1] especially for antibiotic resistance. [2]
By stotting (also called pronking), a springbok (Antidorcas marsupialis) signals honestly to predators that it is young, fit, and not worth chasing.. Within evolutionary biology, signalling theory is a body of theoretical work examining communication between individuals, both within species and across species.
For policymakers, denying addicts the best scientifically proven treatment carries no political cost. But there’s a human cost to maintaining a status quo in which perpetual relapse is considered a natural part of a heroin addict’s journey to recovery. Relapse for a heroin addict is no mere setback. It can be deadly.
In some instances in the natural sciences a seemingly intangible concept may be quantified by creating a scale—for example, a pain scale in medical research, or a discomfort scale at the intersection of meteorology and human physiology such as the heat index measuring the combined perceived effect of heat and humidity, or the wind chill ...