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

1992年，约翰·格雷写了一本现在很有名的书《男人来自火星，女人来自金星》(哈珀·柯林斯)。在这一点上，他以书名为中心比喻，说明了男性和女性之间的许多差异。他想象两性是如此不同，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，男性和女性评估或给他们的关系打分--但他们根据不同的标准打分！格雷认为，当一段关系中的付出和索取的数量没有得到公平的评估或评分时，这一点是显而易见的。这可能会导致感觉上或实际的关系不平衡，导致怨恨等。总体而言，这本书中的观点被证明是一种流行的方式，从性别差异的角度来思考人际关系是如何运作的。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来自植物和动物的证据惊人地吻合。例如，人们在20世纪70年代意识到，两性之间关于生殖的互动往往是冲突而不是合作，而不是合作，而不是合作。因此，在生殖方面应该投入多少精力和资源，以及多久进行一次这种投资，两性之间经常存在“分歧”。一个很好的例子是关于交配频率的进化分歧。雄性经常从频繁的交配中获益，而雌性通常不会。此外，女性经常因为交配过于频繁而显著缩短寿命(我们现在知道这一影响也适用于人类)。由于频繁交配而导致的寿命缩短，在男性身上并没有出现同样的程度。最近人们意识到，这些性行为，即男性对女性寿命的影响，实际上可能是一个重要的长期存在的谜题：为什么男性和女性的寿命往往截然不同。例如，人类女性通常比男性多活至少4年。这种性别差异在动物界也是非常常见的，可以在两个方向上发生。在实验环境中，测量寿命和识别长寿“基因”的方法通常是使用非生殖个体，或者是那些在生命早期交配的个体，然后与异性保持距离。因此，这样的测试遗漏了一些重要的东西--经常接触异性的影响。现在，人们认为，格雷所描述的，以及杰夫·帕克、理查德·道金斯和比尔·赖斯等进化生物学家早期认为的那种“性冲突”，可以通过考虑性别对另一种性别的影响，在很大程度上解释寿命和衰老方面的性别差异。这项研究的中心目的是评估这一观点，并研究这些差异的潜在遗传基础，这些差异是必要的，但有时是危险的。性别之间的联系。这项工作很重要，因为这将是对这些想法的第一次全面测试，也是第一次探索性别冲突引起的性别差异的基因组基础。我们为这一提议收集的原则数据的证明表明，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应用于应用部门的害虫控制的畜牧业实践中。总而言之，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加剧，并将确定导致这一现象的潜在基因。

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.