Elisa Heinrich Mora

All Publications

• Evolution under stochastic transmission: Mutation-rate modifiers. Theoretical population biology Heinrich-Mora, E., Feldman, M. 2026

  Abstract

  Evolutionary analyses of large populations commonly incorporate stochasticity through temporal variation in selection while treating genetic transmission as fixed. Much less attention has been given to stochasticity in transmission itself. We study a selected locus with alleles A and a under constant selection, linked to a neutral modifier locus whose alleles M1 and M2 control the mutation rate from A to a. Under constant transmission, the Reduction Principle applies: near a mutation-selection balance where M1 is fixed with mutation rate u1, a rare allele M2 invades if its associated rate u2 is smaller than u1, but cannot invade if u2 is larger than u1. This result holds for both haploid and diploid populations and is independent of recombination, which affects only the rate, not the direction, of evolutionary change. We extend this framework by allowing the mutation rate associated with the invading modifier to fluctuate randomly across generations. In this stochastic setting, invasion is no longer determined by mean mutation rates alone. Instead, it depends on the temporal distribution of mutation rates, the strength of selection at the selected locus, and the recombination rate between modifier and target. Stochastic transmission and recombination therefore do not merely rescale deterministic predictions based on the Reduction Principle; they can alter the direction of selection on modifier alleles.

  View details for DOI 10.1016/j.tpb.2026.02.003

  View details for PubMedID 41730461

• An <i>n</i>th-Cousin Mating Model and the <i>n</i>-Anacci Numbers FIBONACCI QUARTERLY Mora, E., Rosenberg, N. A. 2026

  View details for DOI 10.1080/00150517.2025.2581296

  View details for Web of Science ID 001693200200001

• Culture is not ecology EVOLUTION AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR Denton, K. K., Heinrich-Mora, E., Egan, N., Feldman, M. W. 2025; 46 (5)

  View details for DOI 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2025.106717

  View details for Web of Science ID 001527021600003

• Conformity to continuous and discrete ordered traits. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Heinrich Mora, E., Denton, K. K., Palmer, M. E., Feldman, M. W. 2025; 122 (3): e2417078122

  Abstract

  Models of conformity and anticonformity have typically focused on cultural traits with unordered variants, such as baby names, strategies (cooperate/defect), or the presence/absence of an innovation. There have been fewer studies of conformity to cultural traits with ordered variants, such as level of cooperation (low, medium, high) or proportion of time spent on a task (0% to 100%). In these studies of ordered cultural traits, conformity is defined as a preference for the mean trait value in a population even if no members of the population have variants near this mean; e.g., 50% of the population has variant 0 and 50% has variant 1, producing a mean of 0.5. Here, we introduce models of conformity to ordered traits, which can be either discrete or continuous. In these models, conformists prefer to adopt more popular cultural variants even if these variants are far from the population mean. To measure a variant's "popularity" in cases where no two individuals share precisely the same variant on a continuum, we introduce a metric called k-dispersal; this takes into account a variant's distance to its k closest neighbors, with more "popular" variants having lower distances to their neighbors. We demonstrate through simulations that conformity to ordered traits need not produce a homogeneous population, as has previously been claimed. Under some combinations of parameter values, conformity sustains substantial trait variation over many generations. Furthermore, anticonformity may produce a high level of polarization.

  View details for DOI 10.1073/pnas.2417078122

  View details for PubMedID 39823304