Why adaptation can depress population fitness, and why thinking about it can be enlightening

Natural selection improves population fitness. Right? Well, actually, it is complicated. If individuals can gain an fitness advantage over conspecifics, traits can evolve despite making population performance poorer. I will discuss this with examples involving territorial competition as well as competition for matings, and then ask the audience to step ourside their comfort zone – in case the comfort zone contains the assumption that every organism has a mother and a father. Sexual conflict works quite differently if these assumptions are broken, and the journey to understand why this is the case is quite though-provoking.