The ‘UMR-CNRS 7206 Eco-anthropology’ of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, invites applications to a 5-6 months internship in kinship demography in the Biodemography team of S. Pavard (Professor of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle). This internship will be co-supervised by Samuel Pavard and Christophe Coste, researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, Trondheim, Norway.
Objectives
In many group-living species, interactions between kin—such as cooperation, or competition for resources—are key drivers of (a) individuals’ vital (also known as demographic) rates (e.g., growth, survival, dispersal, and fertility), (b) the determination of their social status and (c) the social inheritance of these vital rates across generations. However, modelling these kinship interactions within structured populations (e.g., structured by age or life history stage) is challenging because they depend on a complex feedback loop: vital rates (considered over chronological time) shape kinship networks (considered over generations), which, in turn, influence the opportunities for kin-structured social interactions, and consequently, vital rates (Pavard & Coste, 2020). This feedback loop is rarely considered and has never been studied in complex environmental scenarios where population stability cannot be assumed over time. As a result, the joint effects of kinship interactions and life history on the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of populations remain poorly understood; especially for conservation biology, and evolution of life-history traits.
Previously, the team developed a mathematical framework to infer kinship networks from vital rates in one-sex populations (Coste et al., 2021; Coste 2025). These developments enabled the integration of familial interactions into models of interplay between vital rates and population dynamics, and the extension of the framework to fluctuating environments (Coste and Pavard, in prep). As an application for evolutionary medicine, the team demonstrated the relevance of these processes for the population genetics of ageing (Pavard and Coste, 2021).
Building on these theoretical developments, the intern will apply these models to answer the following questions: Does kin cooperation stabilises populations, while kin competition drives instability? How do they affect population extinction or viability? How does the dynamic interplay between familial interactions and kinship networks influences the nature and duration of transient phases in population dynamics following environmental perturbations (i.e., phases where population size and structure fluctuate). How are these results affected by the nature of the environmental perturbation (e.g., periodic or stochastic fluctuations, density dependence)?
We will particularly focus on scenarios where environmental conditions drive cooperative or competitive behaviours within generations (between collaterals) and between generations (between ascendants and descendants).
Intern’s expected knowledge and competence acquisition
Expected knowledge :
• ‘R’ or MathLab programing
• Populations dynamics (basics)
• Matrix population models (basics)
Competence acquisition
• In silico analysis and scientific experimental design
• State of the art of structured population modelling
• Advanced evolutionary demography and Kin selection theory
• Scientific writing
References
Coste CFD. 2025. The Kinship Formula: Inferring the numbers of all kin from any structured population projection model, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (46) e2411888122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2411888122
Coste CFD, Bienvenu F, Ronget V, Cubaynes S and Pavard S. 2021. The Kinship Matrix: Inferring a Population’s Kinship Structure from its Demography. Ecology Letters 24(12):2750-2762. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.13854
Pavard S, and Coste CFD. 2021. Evolutionary demographic models reveal the strength of purifying selection on susceptibility alleles to late-onset diseases. Nature Ecology & Evolution 5:392–400 https://doi-org.inee.bib.cnrs.fr/10.1038/s41559-020-01355-2
Pavard S, and Coste CFD. 2020. Goodman, Keyfitz & Pullum (1974) and the population frequencies of kinship relationships. Theoretical Population Biology 133:15-16 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tpb.2019.07.007
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