ALL'S FAIR WHEN LOVE IS WAR: THE EVOLUTION OF LIFESPAN AND AGEING UNDER SEXUAL CONFLICT.

1992年，约翰·格雷写了一本著名的书《男人来自火星，女人来自金星》（哈珀·柯林斯）。在这本书中，他用书名作为中心隐喻，说明了男性和女性之间的许多差异。他设想两性差别如此之大，以至于人们不妨认为他们来自不同的星球。书中的一个主要观点是，男人和女人评估或“评分”他们的关系的货币-但他们根据不同的尺度评分！格雷认为，当一段关系中付出和接受的数量没有得到公平的评估或评分时，这一点就很明显了。这可能会导致关系中感知到的或实际的不平衡，导致怨恨等等。总的来说，这本书中的观点被证明是一种流行的思考方式，从性别差异的角度来思考人际关系是如何运作的——或者不运作的。无论人们如何看待这本书及其遗产，上面描述的中心思想与从植物和动物身上得到的证据惊人地吻合。例如，人们在20世纪70年代认识到，两性之间在生殖方面的互动往往以冲突而不是合作为特征，而不是合作。因此，两性在为繁殖投入多少精力和资源，以及多久投入一次的问题上常常“意见不一”。一个很好的例子就是进化中对交配频率的分歧。雄性经常从频繁的交配中获益，而雌性则不然。此外，女性经常因过于频繁的交配而大大缩短寿命（我们现在知道，这种影响也适用于人类）。这种由频繁交配引起的寿命缩短，在雄性身上却没有达到同样的程度。最近人们意识到，这些性互动，即男性对女性寿命的影响，反之亦然，实际上可能是一个重要而长期存在的谜题的基础：为什么男性和女性的寿命通常非常不同。例如，人类女性通常比男性至少多活4年。这种性别差异在动物世界中也非常普遍，可以发生在任何一个方向。在实验环境中，测量寿命和确定长寿“基因”的方法通常是使用不能繁殖的个体，或者那些在生命早期交配，然后远离异性的个体。因此，这种测试忽略了一些重要的东西——经常接触异性的影响。现在人们相信，格雷所描述的“性冲突”，以及早些时候进化生物学家如杰夫·帕克、理查德·道金斯和比尔·赖斯所考虑的“性冲突”，通过考虑一种性别对另一种性别的影响，可以在很大程度上解释性别在寿命和衰老方面的差异。这里提出的研究的中心目的是评估这一观点，并检查这些必要但有时危险的两性关系的差异的潜在遗传基础。这项工作很重要，因为它将是对这些想法的第一次全面测试，也是第一次探索由性冲突引起的性别差异的基因组基础。我们为这项提议收集的原理数据证明，所提出的方法可以识别新的衰老基因。这项工作也很有用，因为这些想法也可以直接用于应用部门的虫害防治的畜牧业实践。总的来说，这是一个令人兴奋和新颖的项目，它将测试性冲突是否会导致衰老，并将确定负责的潜在基因。

In 1992 John Gray wrote a now famous book 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus' (Harper Collins). In this he illustrated the many differences between males and females using the book title as the central metaphor. He imagined that the sexes are so different that one might as well consider them as originating from different planets. One of the main ideas in the book is that men and women assess or 'score' the currency of their relationship - but that they score according to different scales! This is evident, Gray suggests, when the amount of give and take within a relationship is not assessed or scored equitably. This can lead to a perceived or actual imbalance in the relationship, leading to resentment and so on. Overall, the ideas in this book proved to be a popular way of thinking about how relationships work - or not - in terms of sex differences.Whatever one thinks about the book and its legacy, the central ideas described above accord surprisingly well with evidence drawn from plants and animals. It was realised in the 1970s, for example, that rather than being co-operative ventures, the interactions between the sexes over reproduction are often characterized by conflict rather than co-operation. Hence the sexes often 'disagree' about how much energy and resources to invest in reproduction and how often to make that investment. A good example is evolutionary disagreements over how often to mate. Males often gain from mating frequently and females often do not. Furthermore, females often suffer significantly reduced lifespan from mating too frequently (an effect that we now know is also true in humans). Such lifespan reduction arising from mating frequently is not incurred to anything like the same degree in males.It has recently been realised that these sexual interactions, i.e. the effect of males on female lifespan and vice versa, could actually underlie an important and long-standing puzzle: why it is that males and females often have very different longevity. For example, human females generally live at least 4 years longer than men. Such sex differences are also extremely common in the animal world, and can occur in either direction.In experimental settings the way that lifespan is measured, and longevity 'genes' identified, is often to use non-reproductive individuals, or those that are mated early in life and then kept away from the other sex. Such tests are therefore missing something important - the effects of regular exposure to the other sex.It is now believed that the 'sexual conflicts' of the sort described by Gray and earlier considered by evolutionary biologists such as Geoff Parker, Richard Dawkins and Bill Rice can go a long way to explaining sex differences in lifespan and ageing by considering the effects of one sex upon the other.The central aim of the research proposed here is to evaluate this idea and to examine the underlying genetic basis of the differences in these necessary, but sometimes dangerous, liaisons between the sexes.The work is important because it will be the first full test of these ideas and the first to probe the genomic basis of sex differences caused by sexual conflict. Our proof of principle data gathered for this proposal show that the methods proposed can identify novel ageing genes. The work is also useful because these ideas can also be fed directly into husbandry practices for pest control in the applied sector.Overall this is an exciting and novel project that will test whether sexual conflict can lead to increased ageing and will identify the underlying genes that are responsible.