You should definitely write this one at least! 😀

www.nature.com/articles/nco...

6/6 For example all else being equal, the sex showing earlier onset, or higher rate of early-life reproduction, will accumulate a greater burden of late-acting deleterious mutations, exhibit stronger late-life transcriptional dysregulation and experience faster actuarial and physiological senescence

5/6 This model requires only sex-biased gene expression and age-specific differences in reproductive contributions towards future generations – both are common and supported by the existing empirical evidence

4/6 Anisogamy and ecology shape reproduction/survival, natural selection weakens faster in one sex than in the other. The sex with the fastest declines in selection gradients with age will accumulate greater load of late-acting deleterious mutations, leading to faster ageing and shorter lifespans

3/6 Existing theories (like “unguarded X”, “toxic Y”, “mother’s curse”, or sex-biased life-history trade-offs) each explain part of the pattern, but not all of it. Eg experimental evolution studies of sexual selection and ageing produce highly variable and inconclusive results

2/6 Sex differences in lifespan are everywhere across the tree of life and are very variable: in many species females live longer, in other taxa it’s the opposite (eg shorturl.at/Nts1A)

10/ This suggests the idea that transgenerational effects are can be just a delayed cost of intergenerational benefits. We discuss a TE/small-RNA-based “multigenerational trade-off” hypothesis that could generate these patterns and reconcile previous work. The end.

9/ Result: the genotype with short-term F1 gains but F3 costs can still win and nearly fix in the population, because selection mostly “sees” the immediate advantage before the debt comes due

8/ We then built boom-and-bust population simulations, comparing:
🧬 a genotype with this F1 benefit + F3 cost
vs
🧬 a genotype with no inter/transgenerational effects